Multidisciplinary climate play cicadas is ambitious and daring, but also a mess

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• Title: cicadas
• Created by: David Yee and Chris Thornborrow
• Performed by: Monica Dottor, Ryan Hollyman and Ellora Patnaik
• Director: Nina Lee Aquino
• Company: Tarragon Theatre and NAC English Theatre, in association with fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company
• Venue: Tarragon Theatre Mainspace
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs until May 24

There is no weirder way to measure time than by the comings and goings of periodical cicadas. Bred to emerge every 13 or 17 years, the creatures crunch underfoot, their yowls filling the air with a buzzy hum. The bugs are ugly but inevitable, a side effect of North American summers that every generation or so makes you wonder if aliens might, in fact, be real.

cicadas, a stage thriller co-created by David Yee and Chris Thornborrow and directed by Nina Lee Aquino in Tarragon Theatre’s Mainspace, is just as strange as its yellow-winged namesake. The piece borrows from multiple disciplines: While it most obviously resembles a play, the project also uses live music and dance to assist in the telling of its frequently nonsensical story.

The end result is a theatrical experience that doesn’t fit into any one genre – but also one that never weaves its disparate threads into one cohesive narrative. While, yes, cicadas is ambitious and daring, it’s also a mess – and a disappointing entry in Tarragon’s otherwise formidable 2025-26 season.

The two-and-a-half-hour tragicomedy mostly follows the Vonnegut family – Janie and Trim, played by real-life couple Monica Dottor and Ryan Hollyman, and their daughter-to-be, who they name Cassandra. And fittingly so: Janie and Trim’s real estate agent (Ellora Patnaik, who plays multiple roles) warned the lovebirds not to move into a house with a mysterious, permanently locked basement. But did they believe her? Just like the Trojan princess of Greek mythology for whom their daughter is named: No. Of course not.

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And thus emerges the first of several holes in Yee’s script: Why do the Vonneguts decide to move into a home they know comes with such baggage? He’s a contractor and mathematician; she’s a dreamer, sure, but not a fool. cicadas, a play about a house’s weak foundation, has one of its own.

Janie soon gives birth to Cassandra at home – in the basement, a cavernous liminal space filled with impossibly pure, microplastic-free water. (Indeed, frequent floods have tanked the home’s resale value – as in the best don’t-go-in-there horror films, cicadas makes sure the Vonneguts are all but stuck in their extremely haunted house, unable to move or make significant changes to the structure as they suffer.)

Cassandra grows up. Her parents dote on her and each other. A birthday arrives, and the family celebrates with a tea party filled with stuffed animals and laughter.

And then Cassandra goes missing.

Yee’s first act is full of promise and intrigue: Trim’s explorations of the schisms between mathematics and faith are fascinating, and practical stage effects make the story feel immediate and frightening. Thornborrow’s score, performed live behind a wall of Jawon Kang’s angular set, feels like something straight from a Jordan Peele film – tantalizing peeks through the basement door show pianist Wesley Shen stroking the strings of an open piano, creating an atmospheric tension that even Alfred Hitchcock might admire.

But cicadas is both unfinished and overstuffed. Logic issues prevail: It takes a shocking amount of time for mathematician Trim to note that the matrix of numbers on his downstairs wall is an obvious Fibonacci sequence. (The significance of which, by the way, is never fully explained.) As well, in Aquino’s staging, it’s very unclear when we’re in the basement – that magic, self-opening door is used so frequently that it all but loses its meaning by the end of the first act.

Movement sequences further muddy the dramaturgical floodwaters: A number of heavy-handed dance passages see Patnaik embody a human-sized cicada, in stylistic departures that vault the whole production into melodrama territory.

Not all is lost, however: Dottor and Hollyman offer a compelling, utterly believable take on a husband-and-wife duo caught in the claws of Toronto’s unfavourable housing market. They eke laughs out of the script that aren’t on the page, and successfully mine Yee’s script for nuance.

Patnaik is stuck with worse writing – “It’s giving pastoral, it’s giving Group of Seven,” one of her ditzier characters says of an onstage painting – but she mostly navigates her collection of bit parts without incident. (Minus, of course, those bizarre, anthropomorphic bug ballets.)

It’s a shame cicadas doesn’t work. Its live music is thrilling alongside John Gzowski’s genius sound design; its core story, about a not-so-future Toronto swallowed up by its rivers, is exactly the sort of ecologically-aware drama that ought to play on this city’s stages.

But in trying to be all things – a treatise on math, a Taken-style rescue fable, a spooky-basement ghost story, a dance piece, a climate manifesto, a concert – cicadas manages to be none of them. Like the notorious insects at its centre, the play is brittle, predictable and, yes, strange to look at. Let’s hope it doesn’t take 17 years for it to sharpen into something stronger.