If there was an incident that spurred Cliff Cardinal to write his second single-hander, Huff, you won’t read about it here. Asked if his 2014 script, which gets its Vancouver premiere this week as part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, is based in firsthand experience of the circumstances it describes, the playwright, actor, and songwriter quickly takes the Fifth.

“Not that I want to talk about in the Georgia Straight,” he says, in a telephone interview from Toronto. “I’m sure that would have been a fruitful tree of conversation, but I’m afraid not.”

Cardinal, the son of Métis theatre pioneer Tantoo Cardinal, is a strangely winning blend of candour and obfuscation. Some questions he answers openly; others are dodged with an audible shrug. And at the end of our chat, by which time we’ve reached an uneasy rapport, he offers this writer an unusual out.

“Feel free to lie,” he says. “And I’ll back you up—I’ll back you up to the point of, like, millions of dollars, or a horrible disease… I’ll back you up.”

Part of Cardinal’s evasiveness is due to off-stage shyness, not an uncommon condition among performers. Part is a strategic reluctance to reveal some of the more explosive scenes in Huff—scenes that I’m sworn not to disclose, beyond suggesting that you might not want to wear your best clothes to the show. And part might be his identification with the First Nations figure of the Trickster, under whose influence Huff unfolds.

“I just think that’s about being unpredictable,” he says. “I think people shouldn’t be so predictable, and the world isn’t a very predictable place. That’s as far as I can go with that.”

The play’s central characters, however, are two First Nations brothers. Living under conditions of extreme poverty, they’re physically abused by their widowed father, comforted somewhat by his new wife, and addicted to the toxic release of solvent abuse. But just because Huff opens with the older sibling on the verge of suicide doesn’t mean that their journey is entirely brutal.

“What I’ll say about that is that the play was written trying to show the spirit of really mischievous kids, who have a lot of joy and they’re also in a really hard situation,” Cardinal explains. “So my feeling is that for 65 minutes, the stage belongs to that spirit, and that spirit is mischievous, it’s chaotic, it’s unpredictable.

“And there’s a lot of joy in this story,” he continues. “There’s a lot of joy. You know, when you’re a kid it’s about your imagination. You’re not sitting in every moment thinking about how sad things are; you’re thinking about how you can make them fun.”

Despite the dark themes he’s chosen to work with—his previous play, Stitch, examined the life of a female online sex worker—it’s important to stress that Cardinal’s considerable theatrical gifts are rooted in comedy. Don’t expect to see him touring the standup circuit anytime soon, though.

“You’ve got to be part of the boys’ club if you want to go into comedy,” he notes. “It’s a fraternity, and with theatre I don’t think you so much have to be part of the club. As an artist, all you have to have is an idea, and then you can do it, you can reach an audience. If you have some friends in theatre, that’s great—but if you don’t, you can still do your job.”

By all accounts, Cardinal does his job brilliantly—and that’s no lie.

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presents Huff at the Firehall Arts Centre from Tuesday to next Saturday (February 2 to 6).