Deepwater

The Villains Theatre bring Deepwater to the Neptune Theatre on Tuesday, October 20, and it runs through November 1. It's playing on the Scotiabank Studio Stage at 1493 Argyle Street, so it's a fairly intimate room for a production that's going to be leaning heavily on atmosphere.

Dan Bray wrote the play and is directing it, and he's got Amy Reitsma as May, Liliona Quarmyne as Questa, and Chris George as Casper. The story follows RCMP Inspector Questa Bennett as she investigates a cold case involving a reclusive marine biologist whose young daughter went missing four years ago. From there it opens up into what the company calls a 'surreal procedural' — the investigation is the frame, but the play spends a lot of its time asking what's actually knowable about a life. It follows two mothers navigating a world as bizarre as the deep sea, with the octopus and the anglerfish as recurring images: one brilliant yet deceptive, the other forsaken yet misunderstood.

That surreal side comes through in the staging. Haze, flickering lights, and water-based vaping carry the show, and it contains mature content. It's a production that's already picked up a fair bit of recognition: it won the 2024 Playwrights Guild of Canada Drama Award (Tom Hendry) and the 2025 Merritt Award for Outstanding New Play by a Nova Scotian, and it was a Halifax Fringe Festival 2025 semifinalist in the Modern Tragedy Competition.

The Villains Theatre is a Kjipuktuk/Halifax company run by Artistic Director Dan Bray and Artistic Producer Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac, who have been staging new plays and adaptations since 2009, drawing on comedy, drama, performance art, and parody. Deepwater is the latest to come out of that. It runs from October 20 to November 1 at the Neptune Theatre's Scotiabank Studio Stage, 1493 Argyle Street.