Some spring cleaning, Part 2: two new Canadian plays, two remounts

I didn’t get to Nicolas Billon’s play The Neighbours (Rating: ✭✭✭✭✭) until later in the run, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Like Iceland and Butcher, it’s among his most memorable plays, and in Matt White’s production for Green Light Arts, in association with the Tarragon, it is easily one of the best productions of the year. (After its Toronto run, it played the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts in Kitchener.)

Our narrators are Simon and Denise Armstrong (Tony Nappo and Ordena Stephens-Thompson), a middle-aged, middle-class couple who are still reeling from a shocking event in their neighbourhood. More than a decade earlier, a neighbouring girl named Kayla disappeared without a trace. She was about the same age as the Armstrongs’ daughter, Sophie.

Seven months before the play begins, Kayla suddenly reappears, seeking help from a neighbour (not the Armstrongs). It turns out she’d been imprisoned in a cage for over a decade in the basement of their neighbour, David; she (and her child, conceived during her incarceration) escaped when David inadvertently left her cage open.

The story has, of course, made international news. The neighbours were all questioned by the police; a few talked to the media. And many people can’t stop wondering: how could the Armstrongs, whose window looks onto David’s backyard, not have noticed anything suspicious?

Billon focuses less on the sensational aspects of the story than on the moral and ethical questions it raises about how well we know the people around us, and what our responsibilities are. For instance, Simon has plenty of thoughts about the immigrant neighbours across the street, the ones Kayla ended up running to; he also has a lot to say about his quiet Asian-Canadian neighbour Au Yeung Wei.