Cicadas are evolutionary geniuses. The large, lumbering and pretty much defenceless bugs are “nature’s Twinkies”: fast food for a vast array of predators. Their divide-and-conquer prime-number birthing cycles—1 year, 13 years, 17 years—have evolved to outpace predators who can’t sync to their rhythms. Cicadas wait in darkness, emerge in deafening swarms that are too large for their predators to consume … mate, and then vanish.
It’s mathematics as survival strategy. And it’s also the conceptual spine of cicadas, the world premiere eco-thriller playing at Tarragon Theatre. The show burrowsTarra deeply and disturbingly into the calculations of nature, and asks whether those patterns might be pointing toward something important that we’re not equipped—or ready— to understand.
The play is born from a genuinely unusual collaboration that itself speaks to the link between math and meaning. Governor General’s Award-winning playwright David Yee and acclaimed composer Chris Thornborrow did not work sequentially, by finishing the script, then adding the music. Instead, they collaborated in real time, in what they call “less a co-creation and more of a duet”. The result, developed through the National Arts Centre’s Irresistible Neighbourhoods initiative and workshopped with director Nina Lee Aquino, dramaturg Ric Knowles and climate dramaturg Vicki Stroich, feels organic in the truest sense: text and score (and set and theme) truly breathe together.
It’s 2032, and married couple Janie (Monica Dottor) and Trim (Ryan Hollyman) are house-hunting in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods. The neighbourhood is a character here—more accurately, the land is: the ground that existed before human settlement, which is the confluence of Toronto’s lost and buried rivers. The couple finds a house that seems perfect—except for the basement, which is strangely off-limits, and the foundation, which is sinking. They make a leap, and buy the house., What follows is a thriller with nested mysteries: domestic, civilizational, geological. There’s a periodic flood with no leak. And a hum that won’t stop. And a picture frame on the wall that the characters keep returning to … to see additional details that may have always been there, or may have just appeared. The frame serves as a metaphor for the play itself: it speaks to our evolving ability to understand and represent the world, and the fact that you’re never quite sure what you’re looking at … or whether it’s looking back.
Hollyman and Dottor anchor the production as the central couple navigating new parenthood, old grief, and a house that seems to be digesting them. Hollyman brings weary pragmatism, then frantic, manic dread to Trim’s skepticism. Dottor gives Janie a searching intensity that deepens into heartbreak as the mysteries multiply. And Ellora Patnaik is a revelation, playing multiple characters—including Janie’s professor mother, a city inspector, the couple’s doula, and an important animal that seems to pre-date local human habitation — all with uncanny fluidity and impeccable comic timing.
But the most striking “character” of all may be the music. Amahl Arulanandam (cello), Marc Blouin (clarinet and bass clarinet), Nathan Petitpas (percussion), and Wesley Shen (piano) deliver a live score that functions as an emotional atmosphere and primal soundscape. Their instrumentation provides the respiration of the house, the pulse of buried rivers, and the amplification of simple jump scares into something vast, creepy and elemental. In a lovely touch, the orchestra is positioned behind the door that leads to the forbidden basement — a tacit acknowledgment of the music’s mystical-mathematical power.
Jawon Kang’s eye-catching rounded set design grounds us in representational domestic realism, while echoing and providing unexpected access to the deeper strangeness beneath. Michelle Ramsay’s lighting and John Gzowski’s sound design complete the atmosphere with precision. And Aquino’s direction holds the tonal balance beautifully: this play is a mystery that operates on geological, civilizational, and human-familial scales simultaneously, and she never lets one overwhelm the others.
When cicadas fully emerges, it is a creepy and emotionally taut thriller. The mythology, the mathematics and the music — the prime-number cycles, the Fibonacci sequences embedded in nature, and the race against time for a missing family member — seem to be building towards an all-encompassing, all-solving revelation. But the play pivots. Instead of solving the human trauma with cosmic clarity, cicadas asks us to perceive and to accept the patterns themselves: not as theorems to be proved, but as grounds for faith in rhythms larger than ourselves. Faith that prey will ultimately survive, and that what is lost will return.
It’s wondrous. It’s unsettling. And it’s a tall ask for a human species known for building families, cities, technologies and economies through action and force, not faith and patience.
cicadas continues at Tarragon Theatre’s Mainspace until May 24, 2026. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
