Sean Devine was born in 1970, but the era that figures most prominently in his plays is the decade preceding his birth. Devine’s first play, Re:Union, dramatized Vietnam protester Norman Morrison’s 1965 self-immolation outside the Pentagon. A highlight of last year’s theatre season, Re:Union will be presented at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival next June; it will also have a staged reading in New York City in December.

Devine’s new play, Except in the Unlikely Event of War, springs from the same era. It’s inspired by a 1967 book, Report From Iron Mountain, supposedly a leaked, top-secret U.S. government document (later revealed to be a work of satire) asserting that war, not peace, is in the best interest of humanity. Devine rewinds to 1965 and moves the action—a series of clandestine think-tank meetings—to Canada’s Arctic.

“Originally, I was just going to do a straight-up adaptation,” the playwright and actor recalls by phone. But Devine soon realized the play needed more: “Anyone who will read the original book will find that it’s incredibly chilling, but it’s also incredibly dry.”

Re:Union’s historical events were mingled with a contemporary story, and Devine wanted to do something similar with this play. He notes that Report From Iron Mountain “speaks about an elitist form of government that tries to withhold things from the public; it tries to engender fear in the public as a means of control”. To find a present-day parallel, Devine needed look no further than our current federal leadership, which is “very secretive, very behind-closed-doors; they are trying to hold a lot of information back from the public and act in ways that go against freedom of speech”. So Devine created a parallel plot, set in the same location in the near future, in which “there’s a secretive movement within the Canadian government to try to create the impression that war is imminent, and they do that as a means of societal control.”

There’s a third component, too: a metatheatrical subplot in which the actors (including Devine, who is both playwright and cast member), playing themselves, fight for control of the script and disagree over how far it should go politically. This also reflects a trend Devine has noticed in recent years: “Canadian artists and Canadian culture seemed to be under a different kind of microscope than we were used to, and it felt like things were being threatened.” It’s also the source of much of the play’s comedy.

“We’ve been saying that this play is a conceptual mindblower,” Devine adds, “in that not only are we going from story to story to story, but the dramatic styles used in each story are quite contrasting at times.”

The play’s formal shape-shifting reflects one of its central themes, which Devine calls “the mutability of truth”. In the metatheatrical plot, for example, Devine has made cast member Robert Moloney’s character much more aggressively political—he insists that art must be a weapon—than the Sean Devine character. In real life, however, Devine says, “I really am drawn to creating plays that definitely serve as—‘weapons’ sounds so ridiculously pompous, but to serve as vehicles for political action? Absolutely.”

Except in the Unlikely Event of War is the second play in a trilogy that began with Re:Union. Devine is currently researching the third installment, Daisy, which also revisits the American mid-1960s, zeroing in on a famous television ad widely credited with delivering Lyndon Johnson his landslide victory in the 1964 U.S. presidential election.

The era is proving a fertile source of material for Devine. With its mutating plots, Except in the Unlikely Event of War seeks to understand not only that world, but our present-day experience—as Canadians governed by a secretive leadership, and as audience members watching the play take shape before our eyes.