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by Chris Thornborrow & David Yee, directed by Nina Lee Aquino

Tarragon Theatre & NAC English Theatre with fu-Gen Asian Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

May 7–June 14, 2026

Adeline: “Faith is the opposite of mathematics”

The Tarragon Theatre website states that “cicadas [sic] is a modern eco-thriller from the minds of Governor General’s Award and Siminovitch Prize laureate David Yee and award-winning composer Chris Thornborrow that serves as both mystery and warning”. It is true that both Thornborrow and Yee have won awards, but if cicadas is hardly an eco-thriller since it is devoid of thrills and what is has to say about ecology is murky at best. The play is definitely a mystery since by the interval you have no clue what is going on, and don’t care. And it is a warning, mostly to say that just because the creators of a work and its director have all won awards, it is no guarantee that what they produce will be worth seeing.

Jawon Kang’s set divides the playing are into two parts. On stage right is vertically louvered wall with a door in it behind which a four-member musical ensemble is hidden. On stage left is an odd two-storey structure with safety rails below which is a set of low stairs that first rise then fall as it proceeds stage right. In between is winding, widening blue area meant to suggest a river.

To Thornborrow’s music in a prelude to the action Ellora Patnaik, dressed in an undecipherable costume and mask, evidently playing an animal, comes down to have a drink at the “river”. After a serviette is thrown into the river, the animal reacts by turning all ways and tearing down the plastic gauze that has covered the set and winding it around her. So, an animal is entrapped in plastic. This must be the “eco” part of the eco-thriller.

The tone shifts abruptly from the symbolic to the mundane as Patnaik reappears as a real estate agent showing prospective clients Trim and Janie another property. The house is within the couple’s price range but Trim has questions. Why has the house been on the market so long? Why do people who move in move out almost immediately? It happens there is a problem with the basement. When Trim wants to have a look, the agent warns him and Janie never to go down there. She has to admit that the previous owners went down there and never returned. In fact, quite unlike an ordinary realtor, she advises the couple not to buy the house.

Any sensible couple would heed this warning, but the pregnant Janie has some kind of “feeling” that this is the place where she would like to give birth. Trim doesn’t want to counter Janie’s “feeling” and so they buy the house. This is a familiar trope of horror movies like The Conjuring (2013) that begin with people making a completely irrational decision.

The “door that must not be opened” is also a horror trope so familiar that Yee has Janie reference the tale of Bluebeard’s castle. As in all such stories, Trim, of course, opens the door and goes to the basement. The only strange thing seems to be that it is two feet deep in water one day and perfectly dry the next. While the river-like area was outside the door when the couple buys the house, it later, confusingly, also represents the basement.

Eventually, Janie gives birth and leaves the child, Cassandra, alone in her room which is in the river-like are but is meant not to be the basement. When she returns, Cassandra has vanished. For the rest of the play, Trim searches for Cassandra while Janie waits for her in vain.

Interspersed with scenes of Trim and Janie’s distress, are flashbacks involving Janie’s mother Adeline who was a math professor. Some of these flashbacks are in the distant past when Trim was one of her favourite students. Adeline enthuses about how mathematics can describe everything in nature, even irregularity and chaos. In one class she posits that faith is the opposite of mathematics. Some of these flashbacks are in the more recent past when Trim discovers that Adeline’s belief in mathematics has been so shaken that she decides to commit suicide. It an extreme and illogical response, but it fits in with the general scheme of the play which involves extremes and irrationality.

The terrible feeling you get long before intermission is that Yee set up a deliberately clichéd situation but has no clue how to develop it. This is evident in the eclectic, metaphorical elements that Yee attaches to the action which, rather than helping to make it clearer, make it more confusing.

One of these is the discovery that the house is not merely subsiding but actually sinking into the ground to the point where the front door cannot be opened. Another is that the year of Cassandra’s disappearance coincides with the appearance of periodical cicadas emerging from their 17-year cycle. Adeline mentions cicadas in one of her lectures and points out how cicadas evolved a 13-year or 17-years cycle to avoid the peaks in population growth of their predators. The large number of cicadas stuck to the couple’s front door is also given as a reason why it can’t be opened. Yet, why Yee has chosen cicadas as his title remains a mystery.

Further, the couple possesses a symbolic object, a painting done by Adeline. The curious aspect of this painting is that it changes what it depicts depending on events in the action. There was no river in the landscape when Janie first saw it, now, after buying their strange house there is a river in it. Later, after the couple has lived in the house, the windows light up. We see none of this since the magical painting is represented by an empty frame. Yet, this is Yee’s attempt as a mise en abyme where something on stage symbolizes the whole of the action. What does it mean that Adeline painted it? Who knows? If she could foresee the future, how did she not foresee her own coming disenchantment with math?

As if this were not enough, Yee also includes flashbacks to Janie as a young girl birdwatching with Adelne. In the first few of these scenes, all is well. But in the last one, Adeline begins identifying birds that don’t live anywhere near Canada. Does that mean Adeline is losing her marbles? Is that the real reason she commits suicide?  Again, who knows?

The problem with including so many incomprehensible would-be parallels to the plot is that we very soon do not care about the plot at all. This was clear the night I attended when after the interval there were noticeable defections from the audience who had decided that Yee had not set a mystery intriguing enough to make them stay for the conclusion. Their decision was a good one since the conclusion makes even less sense than everything that has gone before.

Ryan Hollyman and Monica Dottor do what they can with their two-dimensional roles. The key thing they can’t do is make us care about their characters. Ellora Patnaik plays a wide range of roles from the animal, the realtor, Adeline, a repairman and a loony psychic. Patnaik, a dancer, is good at differentiating the characters by movement, but sadly not by changes of voice leading to occasional confusion over who was who.

Nina Lee Aquino, normally a very straightforward director, seems not to have figured out the play either. This is clear in how she uses Jawon Kang’s set. Even in Act 1 we no longer know whether the terrible “forbidden door” opens into or out of the basement. For the longest time I thought Cassandra’s bedroom was somehow in the basement (i.e., formerly the river), only to find out it was elsewhere.

The saving grace of cicadas is Chris Thornborrow’s music. Most of the time its rumblings, ostinato and unusual chords evoked the danger, tension and mystery that Yee’s words singularly failed to do. Most of the time I wished that the characters would cease with their banal dialogue and let us listen more fully to the intriguing sonorities of music. Perhaps, Thornborrow can salvage something from the show by creating a suite for his ensemble of cello, clarinet, percussion and piano.

Certainly, Yee was hoping to write another play in the mode of magic realism as in his award-winning play carried away on the crest of a wave (2013). This time there is neither magic nor realism. Let’s hope he can find both next time. Meanwhile, I am very glad to have been introduced to Thornborrow’s music.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Ellora Patnaik as an animal and Ryan Hollyman as Trim; Monica Dottor as Janie and Ellora Patnaik as Adeline; Ryan Hollyman as Trim and Monica Dottor as Janie; Nathan Petitpas on percussion. © 2026 Jae Yang.

For tickets visit: tarragontheatre.com.