Trish Cooper never quite got the break she was hoping for in Toronto. So, almost 10 years ago, the mostly out-of-work actor, whose agent had just fired her, moved back home to Winnipeg at the age of 33. The Manitoba theatre scene was thriving and she figured she could hole up with her mom for a few months—but it wasn’t quite the homecoming she expected.

“She said, ‘Sure, you can come and stay, but I’ve given your room to Thon,’ ” Cooper recalls, laughing over the phone from her Winnipeg home.

Thon is a South Sudanese refugee, one of the “Lost Boys”, a name given to the more than 20,000 young boys who had been orphaned or displaced and were fleeing the genocide of the second Sudanese civil war. Cooper’s mother welcomed him into her home in the mid-2000s and the ensuing culture clash inspired Cooper’s breakthrough full-length debut, Social Studies, which has its Vancouver premiere at the Firehall Arts Centre next week.

Cooper remembers being “moved and shocked” by Thon’s horrific experiences. His life put hers in stark perspective: Thon was a 22-year-old survivor, while Cooper sometimes felt like a 33-year-old failure, but that made the funny stuff stand out in sharp relief.

“I was unemployed, I had this long-distance relationship and I didn’t know what was happening with it, I didn’t have any acting work, and I’m back in Winnipeg in my mom’s house feeling not so amazing—and then here he is, and it’s just like, ‘Well, you can really never complain about anything, you know?’ Like, he’s had a way worse time of things.”

In Social Studies, which is only very loosely inspired by real life, Cooper plays up a quasi-sibling rivalry, but she says there was never any real competition, even as she admits, with a laugh, to feeling pretty sorry for herself at first.

“Someone who’s been through that, you can never be annoyed with them, you know? Like, even if they do the annoying things that, you know, ‘roommates’ do?” she says. “He called us all ‘sister’ and ‘mother’ and he was like a kid that was living in my mom’s house and taking the car and expecting to get cleaned up after and—you know, like all those things that a lot of young men and young women do. But he obviously had such a different situation, because he was… He never had parents to sort of teach him that this is the way you do things.”

Cooper says she tried to be conscientious about the trauma and tragedy at the root of Thon’s refugee experience, but she knew that there was plenty of comedy to be mined from the Canadian side.

“The last thing I would ever want to do is make fun of someone who has been through a genocide, you know?” she notes. “The joke is on us, the sort of middle-class Canadians­—on this family, or me. It’s not at his expense. I cope with comedy myself but I also think there is a fine line.”

The refugee experience is particularly present in Cooper’s mind right now as Canada opens its borders to displaced Syrians. Cooper hopes the Liberal government will make it easier on Syrians than Canada did on their Sudanese counterparts. In an it-would-almost-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-so-terrible twist, Thon and his fellow Africans began the difficult process of starting over while saddled with a bill for their transportation.

“After a year, they were paying interest on a couple of thousand dollars of plane fare!” Cooper says. “Surely, we can do better than that.”

Social Studies runs at the Firehall Arts Centre from Saturday (November 21) to December 5.