In just a few weeks, April 14th 2026 will mark 10 years since the provincial government declared a state of emergency in British Columbia regarding drug-related overdoses and deaths. A March 2026 article in the Tyee by Michelle Gamage reports that over 19,053 British Columbia residents have died since unregulated fentanyl began appearing in the province’s illicit drug supply in 2014. Evidence of this crisis is perhaps most salient in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood that is, for many, synonymous with drug use and addiction. While Vancouver is, in many ways, the centre of the toxic drug supply crisis, it is also a centre of advocacy, resistance, and community resilience. As early as 2003, for instance, Vancouver became home to North America’s first supervised injection site when Insite opened its doors in the Downtown Eastside. Against the backdrop of the city’s prolific history with illicit drugs, to stage a play about addiction in Vancouver is an ambitious choice. Written in 2015 and originally staged at the National Theatre in London, People, Places, and Things focuses on addiction through presenting one woman’s experience of attending a detox and rehabilitation program at a treatment facility.

We first meet the protagonist of People, Places, and Things mid-performance, as she embodies Nina in Chekov’s The Seagull. Emma, a thirtysomething stage actress, begins to falter as she delivers her lines. As the actress jitters and stumbles throughout Nina’s dialogue with Konstantin, her surroundings transform as the audience watches her move through a pill-fuelled night at the club before bringing herself to a clinical waiting room. Through overhearing a phone call between Emma and her mother and observing Emma check in at the clinic’s reception desk, the audience quickly learns of the extent of the actress’ dependence upon alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, and benzodiazepines, among other substances. Compelled by unemployment and a fear that her substance use could soon invite fatal consequences, Emma admits herself to a rehabilitation program.

Once inside, she undergoes a painful detoxification process. Innovative uses of lighting, sound, and movement by an ensemble cast, represent and simulate for the audience the actress’ symptoms of withdrawal. In her first days at the centre, Emma meets a ragtag group of care workers and fellow inpatients and realizes, to her chagrin, that her treatment program involves mandatory group therapy. The actress learns that the group’s primary therapeutic method is strikingly similar to what she does for a living. They call it “practicing”— each group member takes their turn to devise a scene, assigning a fellow resident the role of a loved one to rehearse for the ninth step of a 12-step program: making amends. As a skilled performer, Emma is repeatedly conscripted to act alongside her peers to “practice,” in spite of her reluctance to participate. Slowly, she begins to develop a fondness for the group and its facilitator. On the night that her closest confidant is set to “graduate” from the rehabilitation program, though, Emma grows impatient with her own slow progress, and ends Act 1 with an unsettling public spectacle.

The story continues two months later at the start of Act 2, and the plot progresses quickly as Emma engages more deliberately with the emotional root of her addictions. As she explores the currents of her memories, she finds an unlikely buoy in the form of an advertisement monologue. Emma explains to her confidant, Mark, that her first paid acting gig was performing at trade shows for a company called Quixotic. Recalling the bland and ambiguous monologue that she memorized for her trade show performances, she divulges to Mark that long after she began working more serious acting jobs, she continued to use the Quixotic speech as an audition monologue. She offers the reasoning, “if I could make this bullshit marketing speak work, if I can make this list of abstract nouns sound meaningful then they’d see how good an actress I am.” The long-memorized advertisement monologue becomes, in a way, an incantation for the actress as she attempts to reckon with her history of self-destruction.

The Search Party’s production of People, Places, and Things proves true the protagonist’s belief that a truly talented performer can make a lacklustre script sparkle. Onstage for the duration of the entire play, Tess Degenstein brings Emma to life with a vigorously energetic and dynamic performance. With support of a strong ensemble cast, as well as clever sound and lighting design that help to make Emma's inner world visible, Degenstein endears the audience to a protagonist who is not always easy to like. Degenstein and her castmates elicit laughs, pangs of grief, and ultimately, a passionate standing ovation. Through her performance as Emma, Degenstein invites the audience to empathize with Emma’s experience of addiction.

The impact of Degenstein’s performance is impressive, especially in light of the script’s limitations. While People, Places, and Things is promoted as a critically acclaimed play, its dialogue is, at times, disappointing, and the play’s framing of addiction feels simplistic, or even, in some ways, conservative. As his characters explore their own inner worlds and interpersonal dynamics, Duncan MacMillan’s writing occasionally feels heavy-handed, leaving little room for audience members to read between the lines. As well, the story’s pacing feels a bit strange at times, with much of Emma’s growth and character development compressed within the play’s short second act. The script redeems itself, however, with moments of poignance and cleverness. As the story revolves around the experiences of an actress, the People, Places, and Things uses metatheatrical elements particularly well as it raises interesting questions about performance and reality.

The play is daring insofar as it engages with a thorny and polarizing social issue, but its writing falls short of intervening boldly in the cultural conversation surrounding addiction. In both popular and therapeutic discourse, we often use multiple frameworks (sometimes competing, sometimes complementary) in our descriptions of addiction. We may, for example, attempt to describe addiction in physiological, spiritual, moral, emotional, or sociological terms. While this ontological murkiness makes available a multitude of conceptual tools for understanding addiction, it also makes possible the proliferation of troubling generalizations and oversimplifications regarding addiction and its treatment.

One such oversimplification appears within an early scene in People, Places, and Things when Emma’s psychiatrist uses the metaphor of a parasite to describe addiction. The doctor explains, “Your addiction will fight any progress. It’s a parasite and it will fight for its own survival until you’re dead. But progress is possible. I just need to hear you say that you are willing and motivated to make changes.” This characterization of drug dependency gives agency to addiction itself, while also placing responsibility for change solely at the feet of the addicted person. In describing addiction as a self-interested parasite against which Emma must contend, the psychiatrist frames addiction in a way that removes it from a broader social context. The play, as a whole, echoes this atomizing model of addiction, as Emma’s journey ultimately brings her to accept responsibility for her emotional wounds as she embraces a Narcotics Anonymous-style recovery program. Representations in media and art have the potential to powerfully shape popular perceptions of drug users and addiction. To do justice to the experiences of people with addictions, we must choose our metaphors with care.

In a city so closely associated with substance use, taking care in how we narrate addiction is particularly warranted in the context of divisive rhetoric surrounding drug use. A 2023 article from the CBC reports on the Provincial Health Officer and Chief Coroner’s condemnation of the polarizing rhetoric around the opioid overdose crisis in response to federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Polievre’s motion to redirect funding from harm reduction services to addictions treatment. Polievre’s platform promises to “invest in recovery, cut off federal funding for opioids and defund drug dens, so we can bring our loved ones home drug free.” While, of course, accessing addictions treatment can powerfully and positively impact the lives of those diagnosed with substance use disorders, Polievre’s plan ignores the social determinants of health that shape experiences of addiction, as well as the devastation that the toxic drug supply continues to inflict on B.C. communities. Amid the deeply polarizing rhetoric that surrounds addiction and the associated issue of drug toxicity, any piece of art that humanizes people with lived experience of addiction is perhaps a move towards promoting compassion. But this play’s focus on individual recovery through a 12-step program is curiously congruent with Polievre’s neoliberal logic that frames addiction as a phenomenon that happens at the site of the individual, and that ought to be addressed through therapeutic, rather than structural, change.

In her letter in the program guide, the play’s director, Mindy Parfitt, writes that “pulling the curtain back from complicated and dangerous topics can build connection and compassion.” Certainly, People, Places, and Things opens up room for dialogue that is deeply relevant to Vancouver communities, but written 11 years ago for audiences at a major British theatre, it is perhaps not the play most well-suited to Vancouver stages in 2026. Addiction is a complex social issue, and addressing individuals’ unique experiences and trauma through therapeutic treatment must be part of more holistic attempts to engage with addiction, and associated social issues, at multiple levels. The Search Party’s production of People, Places, and Things has the potential to open up space for a critical conversation on drugs and addiction. With a pre-show community panel on addictions and recovery on March 15th, the show’s creative team seems to be invested in using this performance as an opportunity to invite engagement, dialogue, and change. While placing experiences of addiction in centre stage is a move in the right direction, the conversation cannot end with the simple promotion of a 12-step program. Commendably, MacMillan’s script avoids placating viewers with a neat and tidy ending, inviting us to stay with the trouble, and perhaps leaving room for us to engage with questions surrounding drugs and addiction that are relevant to our own communities in 2026.

The Cultch presents People, Places, and Things from March 10 to 22, 2026 at the Historic Theatre. Find more details about showtimes and tickets here.

Avery Qurashi (she/her) lives in so-called Vancouver with her friends and a fluffy cat named Rat. Her book reviews have appeared in Room and EVENT. Avery holds an MA in English from UBC and enjoys reading, choral singing and bike rides to the beach.

SAD Online

People, Places, and Things Places Addiction Centre Stage at The Cultch