In The Goodnight  Bird, a play that premieres at the Kay Meek Centre this week, a homeless man leaps off the roof of a condo and lands on an aging couple’s balcony. Colleen Murphy’s wryly funny script shakes the long-married pair out of their comfort zone and spurs them to reassess their lives with the inhibition-free vagrant who invades their bedroom.

It all has veteran actor Nicola Cavendish, who plays the wife, Lilly, thinking hard about those who spend cold nights on the street.

“I’ll never forget the time in Toronto, where I was working, and the first time I saw someone in the dead of a January winter lying on one of those grates for warmth. And there wasn’t just one, there was one on that corner and one on another and another,” Cavendish recalls, speaking over the phone on a break from going over lines with costar Christopher Hunt at her North Van home. “You realize you can never, ever allow yourself to ignore it, if it means giving somebody an orange or $5. Just yesterday in the paper I saw a headline that a city is having trouble ‘cleaning up’ homelessness—as if these people are garbage.”

At 62, the legendary local actor, who is perhaps best known for her national tour of Shirley Valentine, can clearly be choosy about the projects she does. As she jokes, “There are books to be read and countries to be seen.” So The Goodnight Bird clearly spoke to her. She had been following Canadian playwright Colleen Murphy’s witty yet deep scripts (Armstrong’s War, Pig Girl, The December Man) for years before she found out she was being eyed for the lead female role in Bird. The production grew into a labour of love, coproduced with Montreal’s Centaur Theatre Company under former Vancouver director Roy Surette. Cavendish likes that it’s also a chance for West Van’s relatively new Kay Meek to show off its intimate stage and build a theatre audience.

“As you get older everything matters that much more,” she comments. “And you have, hopefully, that much more compassion for the subject that needs to be portrayed.”

That’s probably necessary in this work because The Goodnight Bird is so challenging for its actors—even ones as experienced as Cavendish, it turns out. It digs deep into the well-steeped resentments of a marriage. Cavendish’s Lilly, she says, is a powder keg ready to explode, a slightly overbearing woman raised in an era of grace and manners. Hunt’s character has just survived a heart attack. Familiarity has bred contempt between them, and the strange arrival of the homeless man forces them to confront it.

“We assume from the script that they haven’t had much of a physical relationship,” Cavendish explains. “They’ve been having surface conversations when really they should be talking about who they are and what they need and what they have and what they don’t have—in the time they have!”

Cavendish says the most difficult challenges of the play are nailing the right, blackly comic tone and handling the language—which sometimes turns to explosive anger as the husband and wife lash out.

“It’s one of the toughest pieces I’ve ever had to learn: her lines are packed and yet very succinct and sparse,” she explains before heading into the theatre for rehearsals. “We’re serving a dark comic god, but at the same time it finds its way through the dank, dark earth to something quite beautiful.”

The Goodnight Bird is at the Kay Meek Centre from Thursday (January 29) to February 14.