‘Girls and Boys’ is a painful solo show about loss and betrayal. But for Fiona Mongillo, the play’s future at Crow’s Theatre couldn’t be more bright

There’s no good way to summarize “Girls and Boys,” the haunting solo play by Dennis Kelly on its way to Crow’s Theatre at the end of January.

It’s violent. It’s surprisingly poetic. It’s horrifically sad and a difficult watch — perhaps more so for parents. And, it’s stupendously acted by Fiona Mongillo.

Anything more than that gives way to spoiler territory. In short, the British play burrows itself into a young family’s trauma, excavating the rubble of a once-happy marriage. What our narrator finds in the ashes of her former life is soul-destroying.

“Girls and Boys” made a splash in Stratford last summer, a quick jaunt from the behemoth Stratford Festival. I saw the show with Star theatre critics Karen Fricker and Joshua Chong, and together we marvelled at the play’s dramatic bite and Mongillo’s impressive performance. I remember thinking that Here for Now theatre company, nestled into a classroom in Stratford’s Falstaff Family Centre, seemed like it had achieved the impossible: a robust, shimmering and remarkably stripped-down production every bit as memorable as the enormous Shakespearean endeavours just across the river.

Here for Now was founded in 2012 by Mongillo and quickly gained a reputation for high-calibre, pop-up theatre. The company tends to move around from venue to venue — as Mongillo joked to me in a phone interview, at any given time the company is only “here for now” — and its most recent venture is to the Streetcar Crowsnest in Toronto, specifically its intimate studio space for the upcoming run of “Girls and Boys.”

The partnership between Crow’s and Here for Now makes heaps of sense. Crow’s has a knack for producing controversial, buzzy plays — Cliff Cardinal’s radical retelling of “As You Like It,” for instance, which heads to Mirvish’s CAA Theatre in March — and Here for Now is more than ready for a Toronto audience.

“We move to whatever venue will best suit us for a specific year,” said Mongillo, explaining the company’s nomadic tendencies.

“People in Toronto have heard of Here for Now,” she continued. “So that lays the groundwork. We’re not a company out of nothing. Chris Abraham (Crow’s artistic director) wasn’t able to make it out to see ‘Girls and Boys’ while it was running in Stratford. But he had a few trusted colleagues and artists tell him he needed to get the show to Toronto, and I’d been told the same. We both intended to reach out to each other about this particular project,” she said, laughing.

“Crow’s is a really good fit for ‘Girls and Boys.’ While they do a lot of presentations and co-productions, they also take a lot of risks. They’re interested in breaking the mould,” she said.

The Crow’s studio space in particular was appealing for Mongillo. It’s a small but workable playground for artists looking to foster intimacy with their work. “Girls and Boys,” a brutal and spare monologue with little in the way of physical action, demands proximity between artist and audience: the energy in the tiny Stratford classroom when Mongillo performed the role this summer was palpable, and re-creating that atmosphere in the remount was vital.

“Crow’s has developed an adventurous theatre audience,” said Mongillo. “They’re willing to go out there, see lots of different kinds of theatre. I knew I didn’t want to do this show in a large theatre — in our production the intimacy is essential to its quality, and I didn’t want to compromise that by being in a bigger theatre. So it was really my top choice in terms of Toronto spaces to do the show — that worked out!”

When Mongillo first encountered Kelly’s disturbing play, she quickly rejected it. “Too dark and too hard,” she thought, continuing her search for programming for Here for Now. “But then I asked myself, ‘why am I not doing this?’ and ‘why am I rejecting this as an idea?’ And the answer was that I was afraid. I was afraid of the play being too much for Canadian audiences, which in retrospect was a real underestimation of our audiences. Because it wasn’t at all.

“Frankly, I was afraid of the show. It’s 16,000 words, in dialect, with a lot of non-sequiturs — as if I’m not busy enough in the summers — but I decided that if I wanted to say no to something, fear wasn’t how I wanted to do it. The fact that it scared me was actually a good sign that I needed to explore it.

“It’s hard to talk about this play without wrecking it. But the violence it talks about is quite common and even on the rise … and Dennis Kelly handles it like an absolute genius,” she continued.

“This play doesn’t leave anything out. And it’s really, really honest. And I think both (director Lucy Jane Atkinson) and I prioritize telling the truth over anything else in our theatre.

“There’s light and dark. That’s real life, and that’s the brilliance of this play.”

“Girls and Boys,” a Here for Now Theatre Company production, presented in Toronto in association with Crow’s Theatre, opens in Toronto on Jan. 26 and runs through Feb. 12. Tickets are available at crowstheatre.com or by phone at (647) 341-7390 ext. 1010.