If you think the headline is cryptic, you should see the play.

I saw the World Premiere of cicadas, a new work that I understand as an elaboration upon a radio play, a Tarragon Theatre and NAC English Theatre Co-Production in association with fu-GEN Asian Theatre Company, directed by Nina Lee Aquino. Radio drama never lets us see any of the players or the events of the plot. Listeners must use their imagination, as we do when someone tells us a story. Such was our experience with cicadas even though we had a set and actors before us.

David Yee and Chris Thornborrow are both listed as “creator”. I recall David as a playwright from his carried away on the crest of a wave from over ten years ago. I encountered Chris as a Toy Piano composer (concert and CD in 2017), from Bicycle Opera Project’s A Little Rain Must Fall (aha an opera with a libretto by David from 2014), and Hook Up a musical from 2019. Suffice it to say that David and Chris have worked together before, and seem to have an excellent rapport when it comes to collaboration.

This is from the blurb on Tarragon Theatre’s website:
In 2032, while on the hunt for a new home in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods, Trim and Janie are drawn to a very peculiar house. Ryan Hollyman plays Trim, Monica Dottor plays Janie. Ellora Patnaik plays Adeline and others.

Trinity Bellwoods is near the original location of Trinity College, founded by John Strachan and the elite establishment of Upper Canada who controlled life in the city 200 years ago. The location is some of the most important real estate in the country.

I want to invoke theatre history for a moment. Maeterlinck’s early plays such as The Blind or The Intruder are symbolist, a style briefly in vogue although when seen from our time are so melodramatic & obvious as to hit you over the head with the images. Maeterlinck is somewhat subtler in Pelléas et Mélisande, a play Debussy turned into his only opera recently staged by Opera Atelier. Bluebeard’s Castle, playing currently as part of a double bill at the Canadian Opera Company is also symbolist.

Symbols don’t make a play symbolist. A key quality of a symbolist dramaturgy is deliberate ambiguity, evading easy interpretation, to invoke the inexpressible, even suggesting a world that cannot be understood. That is exactly what I felt at the end of cicadas, contemplating the mysteries of our world.

That the audience for the opening of cicadas was so ready to laugh at the most extreme moments, as though we were watching a horror movie unfolding, is consistent with a style that flirts with melodrama. A more typical group without the festive air of an opening night might be more susceptible to the scariest moments of the story. We straddled the boundary between scary & silly, especially after intermission when we descended into something verging on social satire, before plunging deeper into the realms of mystery and the inexplicable. I like that effect, the humour functioning to remove our defences. I dislike it when a critic gives away a story by telling you too much, so I won’t betray the ending, except to say it became even more symbolist.

The philosophical probing in cicadas serves to lead one away from the external focus as we find in real estate listings and realist theatre, towards feelings, essences & hidden meanings. Sometimes that’s accomplished through a de facto report of the inexplicable condition of the house but at other times indirectly, musically.

We were on an interface between science and sensibility, conversations in the present and past, the time-frame sometimes ambiguous, the actions far beyond what you see except in sci-fi or fantasy. Music was a key part of the dramaturgy, taking us away from logic & linearity into a place that was more lyrical and poetic, somewhat subjective, imagined, internal. While I could show you photos of some of the stranger images, I worry that they can’t capture what you feel in the context of music and unfolding drama; so I have chosen not to attempt to deconstruct what was for me a magical experience.

This was the most literal sort of orchestra pit I have yet encountered, four musicians behind a door to the scary basement of the house in Trinity Bellwoods. The answers that lurk in the dark under the house are written in Chris’s music or in strange writing upon the wall.

In the washroom at intermission a fellow traveller said he wished he’d had some mushrooms. He mentioned the atmospheric music. We are in a very stylized world, the images and music taking us far from simple realism into something much richer.

At times the action is as scary as something you’d find in Hitchcock. I think Hitchcock was influenced by symbolists, especially in a film such as Vertigo or North by Northwest, the latter a film full of humorous touches. While the Tarragon audience was often howling with nervous laughter except in the last part, the principals were completely deadpan throughout.

I like the fact that I didn’t see where we were going, that the outcome of the play surprised me. And I liked it a lot. I was moved, and the day after can’t stop thinking about what I’ve seen and heard.

The world premiere production of cicadas will run at Tarragon Theatre until at least May 24th. I recommend that you see it.