Can Jack and Veronyka ever get ahead? In this all-too-relatable love story in a city suffocating under late-stage capitalism, a young couple is pitted against odd after odd in a way that isn’t about testing one’s character anymore—it’s simply reality.

Jack, a second-generation Chinese Canadian cab driver meets Veronyka, an undocumented factory worker and waitress from Moldova, as he’s bringing her from one job to the other. Their chance encounter blooms into an unlikely romance, stolen in moments between shifts, and then a hasty marriage, which solves migration issues but brings the pair even deeper into the challenges of providing for themselves and their families. The painful death of both of Jack’s parents and the sense of helplessness that has dogged both of their families leads Jack and Veronkya to desperate measures to escape. Some hard work mixed with some political blackmail brings them to a new life, but at what cost?

Anthony MacMahon is a Canadian playwright currently working in Toronto. His works include Animal Farm, The Voyager Concert, The Dead (Soulpepper), Trompe la Mort, and Wild Dogs on the Moscow Trains (SummerWorks). He was until recently a planning advisor to former city councillor Joe Cressy and is currently a project lead at the City of Toronto in Solid Waste Management. He’s honoured to be an alumni of the Soulpepper Academy, Concordia University, and the University of Saskatchewan.

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Thomas McKechnie is a Toronto-based playwright and union organizer. They were a part of the 2013–2015 Soulpepper Academy as a writer. Writing credits include The Jungle (Tarragon Theatre, co-written with Anthony MacMahon), 12 Letters from Your Lover, Lost at Sea (with Hannah Kaya), Worm Moon (the Theatre Centre’s Residency Program), 4 1/2 (ig)noble truths (zeitpunktheatre/Why Not Theatre, presented in Toronto, Victoria, Vancouver and more), and Remembering the Winnipeg General (ziepunktheatre). They are a union organizer and a founding member of Artists for Climate and Migrant Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty.

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Guillermo Verdecchia is a writer of drama, fiction, and film; a director, dramaturge, actor, and translator whose work has been seen and heard on stages, screens, and radios across the country and around the globe. The author, or co-author, of, among other works, The Noam Chomsky Lectures and Insomnia (with Daniel Brooks); Fronteras Americanas, The Terrible but Incomplete Journals of John D., bloom; A Line in the Sand (with Marcus Youssef), and the controversial Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil (with Camyar Chai and Marcus Youssef). He is a recipient of the Governor General’s AWard for Drama, a four-time winner of the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, a recipient of Dora and Jessie Awards, and sundry film festival awards for his film Crucero/Crossroads, based on Fronteras Americanas and made with Ramiro Puerta.

He lives in Toronto with Tamsin Kelsey, his partner of many years, and their two children.


Awards and Recognition*
Chalmers Canadian Play Award (1997) A Line the Sand with Marcus Youssef
Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards, Community Recognition Award (1994)
Chalmers Canadian Play Award (1994) Fronteras Americanas
Governor General’s Award for Drama (1993) Fronteras Americanas
Governor General’s Award for Drama, Finalist (1992) The Noam Chomsky Lectures with Daniel Brooks
Chalmers Canadian Play Award (1992) The Noam Chomsky Lectures with Daniel Brooks
Chalmers Canadian Play Award (1990) i.d.

Guillermo Verdecchia's profile page

“[A] powerful political parable.”

Glenn Sumi, NOW Magazine

“This play isn’t about Jack and Veronyka: their love story is the bait—well, let’s call it an invitation—for audiences to consider how it is that systems consistently fail decent people.”

Karen Fricker, Toronto Star

“A punch to the gut: very real and very much told with eyes wide open . . . It moved me and kept me thinking, long after curtain call.”

Isabella O’Brien, Mooney on Theatre

“The Jungle is a boldly political new play, argumentative and direct and a bit radical. It is also a touchingly honest drama, brimming with humor and pathos.”

Louis Train, BroadwayWorld