Nicola Lipman stars as an embattled senior in Joan MacLeod's new drama, Another Home Invasion. (Trudie Lee/Alberta Theatre Projects)

Joan MacLeod’s previous plays — from the comic Toronto, Mississippi to the harrowing The Shape of a Girl — have often been written from a teenage perspective. But in her latest work, the multi-award-winning playwright has leapt to the other end of the age spectrum. Another Home Invasion, premiering this month in Calgary, is a one-woman drama told from the point of view of a feisty octogenarian.

Another Home Invasion gives voice to a seldom dramatized subject: the way Western society treats the elderly. Just as uncommonly, it puts an old person front and centre as a funny, angry heroine.

Jean (played by veteran actress Nicola Lipman) is an able senior living in the same North Vancouver house she and her husband bought more than half a century ago. Now, her husband, Alec, is ailing and the couple is wait-listed to get into a retirement residence. Jean has her heart set on the Kiwanis, a facility where the two can live together with a measure of independence, but Alec’s rapidly declining faculties are putting that prospect in jeopardy.

Their adult children, busy with their own lives, are of little help. Jean is left to struggle bravely with health-care red tape and Alec’s growing dementia, her vulnerability underscored by a grungy meth addict who lurks mysteriously on her doorstep.

The play, directed by Richard Rose and opening Feb. 13 at Alberta Theatre Projects as part of this year’s Enbridge playRites Festival, gives voice to a seldom dramatized subject: the way Western society treats the elderly. Just as uncommonly, it puts an old person front and centre as a funny, angry heroine trying hard to cope in a harsh and indifferent world.

Seniors are “a group you don’t hear a lot from,” says MacLeod during a phone interview from her Victoria home. “There are great stories there and lots of real strength. I wanted to write about that.”

Like her 2001 playRites hit The Shape of a Girl, a powerful look at adolescent bullying inspired by the murder of Reena Virk, Another Home Invasion had its origins in a news story. MacLeod says she read about an old couple in the Kootenays who were separated after 60 years together because of health problems; they both died less than two weeks later. “When I heard that story,” she says, “I felt really moved.” She also tapped into her own vehement feelings about the state of elderly care. “It’s an issue right across the country,” she says, noting that her late mother spent her last decade in a deteriorating seniors facility. “It was privatized and had, I think, six different owners over 10 years. Things kept getting more expensive, and the service not as good, the longer she stayed there.”

Playwright Joan MacLeod. (Alberta Theatre Projects)

As with all MacLeod’s plays, however, the social commentary in Another Home Invasion is discreet; she says her first concern was to create a compelling character with a distinctive voice. She deliberately tailored the role of Jean to the talents of Nicola Lipman, a shrewd but sympathetic actress whose recent credits include acclaimed productions of The December Man and Scorched.

MacLeod says she didn’t know Lipman when she began the play but happened to catch her in a production of The Clean House at the Vancouver Playhouse. “She was unbelievable; she was so good,” MacLeod recalls. “When I started writing about Jean I just kept hearing Niki do it. I wanted someone who I knew wouldn’t be sentimental, who was strong. It was always Niki.”

Lipman says she was “extremely flattered – and daunted,” when she learned MacLeod had written a play for her. “You feel as though it’s an enormous responsibility,” she explains by phone from Calgary. Still, it’s a part she can easily relate to: Lipman’s father is 94.

“What’s problematic for Jean and a lot of older people is that they’re suddenly out of their comfort zone, where they can’t take care of things on their own,” Lipman says. “They really don’t want help, but they need it, and they have to go out and, in some cases, line up for it and beg for it. And it’s very humiliating for them.” Lipman thinks that’s the source of Jean’s anger. “She’s pissed off and frustrated. She’s not just a sweet little old lady complaining.”

To prepare for the part, Lipman met with groups of seniors and even had them read some of the script out loud. However, she says she’d been doing informal research for the role long before she knew of the play. “You run into a lot of older people here and there, at the grocery store or the gym, and I’ve always talked to them,” she says, “because they will talk to you at the drop of a hat. An older person will usually opine on anything, given an opening. They’ll always come out with something, which is historically interesting, perhaps, or very personal, or very humorous. That’s what Jean’s doing in the play – telling us what’s happened to her.”

Another Home Invasion also draws, in Lipman’s words, “a very subtle but interesting parallel” between Jean and Alec and the desperate drug addict that shows up at their door. Both belong to groups that have been pushed to the fringes of society, and both share more in common than first suspected. As we discover, Jean helped Alec overcome a bout with alcoholism in his youth that nearly destroyed their family.

MacLeod says the addiction theme was always part of her scenario. “We tend to think with crystal meth or crack that it’s a whole new world out there, and it is, but it isn’t. It’s all still addiction. And it’s all still heartbreaking. I wanted to put Alec and the [addict] on the same line and see what they shared, how they were connected.”

The 55-year-old dramatist has been handling such thorny subjects since she began writing plays in the mid-1980s. Her first full-length work, Toronto, Mississippi (currently being revived at the Playhouse), concerned a mentally handicapped girl with a wayward Elvis-impersonator father. Her 1991 Governor General’s Award winner, Amigo's Blue Guitar, examined the experiences of war refugees. Little Sister, which picked up a 1995 Chalmers Award, dealt with teenage anorexia.

Although born in Vancouver and now teaching at the University of Victoria, MacLeod launched her career in the 1980s as a resident playwright at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. Another Home Invasion is a co-production with the Tarragon and opens there after its Calgary run. It’s the first time MacLeod has had a new play there since the '90s, and it's her first directed by current Tarragon head Richard Rose. “I worked under [late artistic director] Urjo Kareda for years and years and was kind of nervous of making the transition,” she says, “but it’s gone really well.”

Lipman, on the other hand, has become a familiar face to Toronto audiences of late. The Vancouver-raised, Halifax-based actress has been performing since her teens (she was a regular on the 1960s CBC series Friday Island) and played comic roles for years before Canadian directors started mining her dramatic gifts. With her current crop of heavy plays like Scorched, The December Man and Another Home Invasion, Lipman jokes that she’s going through her dark period. “It’s lucky that I’m as positive and optimistic a person as I am.”

Not that she sees MacLeod’s play as a downer. “She has written something that is not preachy or dogmatic in any way — it’s very active, it’s very positive and it’s very funny.” Besides, the mutual devotion of Jean and Alec, who have weathered so much together, is affecting. “This play is a kind of a love story, too, in a way,” Lipman says. “A very pure and unabashed one.”

Another Home Invasion runs at Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects to March 8 and at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre March 12-April 19.

Martin Morrow is the theatre columnist for CBCNews.ca.