Review: Crow’s Theatre misfires with Wights, a drama needlessly bogged down by zombies | Canada Voices

• Title: Wights
• Written by: Liz Appel
• Director: Chris Abraham
• Actors: Ari Cohen, Sochi Fried, Richard Lee and Rachel Leslie
• Company: Crow’s Theatre
• Venue: Streetcar Crowsnest
• City: Toronto
• Year: To Sunday, Feb. 9

Wights, the new play at Crow’s Theatre, is shocking.

Not the play itself, although it certainly aims to shock and unsettle us. No, what left me truly alarmed is that Crow’s, which has had such a string of hits in recent years, could kick off 2025 with this unfortunate misfire.

I’ll admit to some trepidation going in. Wights was written by Liz Appel, a novice playwright originally from Toronto, now based in New York, and we’re told this is her first professional production.

Appel does, however, have an impressive academic résumé, including graduate degrees from Yale University and the University of Cambridge, and that’s amply evident here, as Wights engages with many of the burning issues igniting academe today.

I was even ready to hail her play as an equally impressive debut after witnessing its overstuffed but fascinating first act, which manages to address race, privilege, the immigrant experience, the legal system, even land acknowledgments, while at the same time dealing with the tensions of two interracial couples.

But then comes Act 2, when everything starts to fall apart – in some cases, literally – like a walking corpse.

Yep, without giving too much away, this is a drama about academics and zombies.

The lead academic is Anita (Rachel Leslie), a Black professor at Yale who is a candidate to head up the university’s Centre for Reparative Thought and Justice. To prep for her job interview, she’s recruited a fellow scholar, Chinese immigrant Bing (Richard Lee), and his white Canadian-American wife, Celine (Sochi Fried), to grill her. The couple have come over for drinks and dinner at Anita’s childhood home, where she was raised by a pair of professor parents who distinguished themselves at Yale.

Enter the outsider, Anita’s half-Jewish husband, Danny (Ari Cohen), whose eyes glaze over at their talk of intersectionality and critical race theory, but who is fighting the good fight down at the courthouse. A criminal defence lawyer, he has just successfully overturned the wrongful conviction of a racialized client.

It’s Halloween 2024, and, more ominously, less than a week before the U.S. election – although everyone is still reassuring themselves that Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump. Besides, fierce Anita is not only prepared to slay them at the interview tomorrow, that will also be the triumphant day she gains ownership of her beloved house, which she lost when her late father willed it to his second wife. What could go wrong?

As it turns out, Danny is about to drop a bombshell that threatens to put Anita’s critiques of privilege to the test, while at the same time revealing a deception that could destroy their marriage.

It’s a great cliffhanger to end Act 1. But Appel isn’t content to stick with compelling human drama; she has to drag in the supernatural. In an academic way, that is. As things get weird and characters begin to decompose, Anita spouts a theory about a new kind of being that turns on the contradictory definitions of the archaic word “wight.”

It can mean both a living creature, as it often does in classic English poetry, but also something that is undead (think of the army of reanimated cadavers in Game of Thrones). She even goes so far as to analyze Shakespeare’s use of the word in the 106th Sonnet – one of those moments when you feel you’re not in a theatre, but a lecture hall.

Danny can be just as pedantic and he counters with a deconstruction of the racial term “white,” which would be quite interesting if it weren’t delivered as a feverish, defensive rant. But by then, the play has lost its moorings and its credibility. It ends abruptly with a ludicrous, seemingly COVID-19-inspired twist that undercuts any investment we may have had in the characters or their plight.

The play’s publicity makes comparisons to Jordan Peele. But his films – such as Get Out and Us – brilliantly mesh the horror genre with social commentary and satire. Wights feels as if its horror element was grafted on, almost as an afterthought. This being a Crow’s show, however, it’s executed with polish.

Director Chris Abraham once again uses an in-the-round, semi-immersive staging, with a warmly domestic set from Joshua Quinlan that centres on a kitchen island, but icy jolts of sinister lighting (Imogen Wilson) and sound (Thomas Ryder Payne) to keep us on edge. The most striking feature, however, is a gleaming tiled floor that serves as a screen for Nathan Bruce’s video design, where increasing spatters of blood and a slowly emerging digital clock prove creepier than anything else in the play.

For the lead role of Anita, Abraham has imported New York actor Leslie, whose credits include the Broadway production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Her tough, superarticulate Anita is thoroughly convincing as a woke warrior, a betrayed wife, a conflicted mother and as a daughter still grieving her own mother’s untimely death.

The other cast members are familiar Toronto faces. Cohen, fresh from playing the lone male in Annie Baker’s Infinite Life at the Coal Mine Theatre earlier this season, again displays his gift for being both aggressively masculine and pathetically vulnerable as Danny. The usually likeable Lee matches him in aggression as the cheerful but cutthroat Bing. Fried’s Celine seemingly fits the mild-mannered-Canadian stereotype but, like Danny, is also harbouring a secret from her spouse. Appel has given these actors such rich characters to play that you wish she hadn’t spoiled everything with her dud ending.

Wights, with its pervading sense of unease, might have captured the zeitgeist without resorting to cheap tricks. There is plenty to dread in 2025, not just for liberal American academics under a new Republican administration, but also for Canadians who are bracing for the disastrous effects of Trump’s threatened tariffs. A zombie apocalypse is the least of our worries.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)