A new theatre company in Toronto has just burst onto the scene with this stunning Canadian play

The King Black Box Theatre is easy to miss.
There isn’t a marquee outside the Parkdale venue, let alone a proper sign. You enter through a storefront door then climb three narrow flights of stairs. The theatre at the top is an unassuming space, with a stage in the front and roughly 40 mismatched chairs in the back, all packed into the third floor of a King Street shophouse, above a dentist clinic and a Popeyes. 
It’s arguably one of the most hole-in-the-wall professional theatres in Toronto. But one thing is for sure: the King Black Box Theatre, presenting just its second play in this new venue, is most definitely not a company to ignore. And if its latest production is any indication, the city’s theatre sector has a formidable new player on the scene. 
It’s quite the statement that the company managed to secure the Toronto premiere of “Girls Unwanted,” by the prolific Canadian playwright George F. Walker. Explosively gripping, the new drama is a bold choice of programming and also the perfect play to introduce audiences to the company, which states it wants to present stories that “dive into gritty reality, the bizarre universe and everything in between.”
“Girls Unwanted” feels in many ways like a classic Walker play: a bold story set in Toronto, exploring contemporary themes that concern the lives of the city’s most marginalized residents, and featuring the playwright’s signature snappy dialogue, multi-layered characters and unexpected humour. 
At its centre are three young women who live together in a halfway house, each haunted by — yet trying to escape — their pasts. Walker’s play is as much a character study as it is a quiet and heart-wrenching appraisal of how a society treats its most vulnerable, how systems meant to support these individuals often spurn them instead. 
Its story could not be more timely, coming less than two weeks after the province announced it was closing most safe injection sites across Ontario, against the advice of many health professionals, and as its largest city continues to grapple with a homelessness crisis.
Like so many of the real-life people whom this play is about, Walker’s characters are stuck at a dead end, uncertain of what their futures hold. They may all live in a halfway house, but “halfway to where is the question,” Alexandra Floras-Matic’s Kat so astutely points out. 
Kat herself has become numbed to the realities of her world. She’s wandered aimlessly for years — given up by her birth parents, then adopted and abused, before spending much of her youth living on the streets. She’s later found by her biological brother Max (Louis Akins), but she struggles to decide whether returning to her birth family is the best way for her to move forward. 
Hanna (Ziggy Schulting), meanwhile, is also struggling with her inner demons, previously accused of stalking and attempting to murder her best friend, now desperately wanting nothing more than to lead a life of independence and escape her prescribed existence, under the watchful eye of Maddy (L.A. Sweeney), the overseer of the residence. As for Marline Yan’s Ash, the third resident of the halfway house, her demons manifest as voices in her head, from the years of trauma she’s continually forced to relive. 
The depths to which Walker draws these characters is astounding. And at the preview show I attended Friday, many of the central performances felt so lived in that you’d be forgiven for thinking these actors have been in their roles for years. 
Yan, in particular, is a revelation. Playing a character living with a mental illness is no easy feat. But she does it brilliantly, delivering a gut-punch of a performance punctuated by a pair of devastating monologues. Floras-Matic is equally impressive, finding the repressed pain and loneliness behind Kat’s hardened exterior.
Walker, who also directs, makes fine use of the small venue, even if some moments feel awkwardly paced or too busily staged. Ultimately, that much of it works so well is because of Sophie Ann Rooney’s exquisitely detailed production designs, which extend into the audience, making us feel as if we are inside this rooming house with Kat, Hanna and Ash.
The space reminds me a lot of the Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto’s east end. Both offer an off-off-Broadway kind of intimacy yet punch well above their weight in the quality of their productions. With “Girls Unwanted,” one of the first major productions to launch the 2024-25 theatre season, the King Black Box Theatre has certainly thrown down the gauntlet.