Shortly before last November’s announcement that Kim Collier had won Canada’s largest annual theatre award — the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize — the director sat in a soulless chain restaurant in Vancouver’s South Granville neighbourhood with her husband, Jonathon Young, writing thank-you cards and stuffing bottles of wine into gift bags. They were both nervous. It was opening night, and Collier was directing her husband in their theatre company’s most daring work to date.

A team of 100 actors, designers, technicians, and filmmakers had entered into the highly complex project with Collier and Young’s Electric Company Theatre. Part film, part play, Tear the Curtain! is set in the 1930s and dissects the war between the two media. Its hero, played by Young, is a twee theatre critic, surrounded by clichéd characters (the mobster, the femme fatale), and engaged in a geekish, all-consuming search for authenticity. There’s a secret society of authentic artists, which the critic cannot contact. Indeed, the character is almost aware that he’s trapped in the cage of a play.

Conceiving the work had been a highly cerebral, nearly untenable endeavour. “We propose,” Young explained to me a few months later, “a world where life is an illusion and there’s nothing behind it except another illusion. It’s my character’s ultimate fear. And it’s mine, too.”

They rewrote the play during rehearsals. Collier, whose directing binder grew to be 15 centimetres thick, wept in the bathtub and was wracked by serious doubts as to whether she could pull off the production. At one point, Young gave up on the work (it’s standard practice for him to be intimidated by the complexities of his creations) and needed to be buoyed along by Collier (also standard practice).

When the pair walked to the theatre on opening night, two hours before showtime, crowds had already formed; a notoriously late theatre audience was eager to see what happens when the city’s greatest indie company gets into bed with the Arts Club, the city’s largest production company. Collier told Young, “You need to just give it all away. Now is the moment.”

Young’s performance that night was a revelation. The work is ambitious and immense. There is scene after scene of a splintered plot line involving gangsters, lovers, secret societies; the production becomes deliberately chaotic to parallel its hero’s crisis. There are several moments when the room the audience sits in becomes reflected, or projected, onto the stage, disrupting their passive consumption of the entertainment. Young moves like a dancer, more poised and more precise, even as his character loses control and suffers a breakdown. In the final scene, the critic and his girlfriend slide down into the audience to watch a movie — thus conflating the immediacy of live bodies and the pleasant numbness of watching a film.

Young later told me he heard an internal voice that night — a small one, calling out to the audience, “Just listen. Just go with me.” In the lobby afterwards, a couple of people were in tears. There was champagne. Collier and Young went out for more drinks with the actors, eventually ending up on a street corner talking about life, about their fourteen-year-old daughter, Azra, who had died the year before.

The couple doesn’t speak publicly about her death, but, inescapably, the tragedy has become part of the conversations that surround their work. Young thought of his daughter every night of the show’s run, often while onstage. How could life and art not collapse into each other? On opening night, a desperate, shaking man tore himself apart, and then, in the play’s final, graceful scene, he gave in to the necessary solace that art provides: Young walked down into the stalls and sat among us, literally joining the escapist crowd.

Collier and young have drifted into each other as much as their lives have drifted into their art. Early this year, I sat between them at a long table in their Progress Lab 1422, a converted factory space in East Vancouver, and had the distinct feeling of being sandwiched by two chattering hemispheres of a single brain. They finish each other’s sentences with casual ease; they quarrel lightly over semiotics, and issue compliments to each other with a deadpan assertiveness, compliments they each accept matter-of-factly, like spoonfuls of medicine. Both are slim and good looking, with intensely drawn features and vulnerable eyes, which makes them seem wise even before they start talking about “the intelligence of the body” or “cultures of mediation.” He tends toward layers and scarves, while she prefers simpler, monochromatic outfits.

Since its inception in 1996, Electric Company has built a dazzling repertoire. Aside from Collier and Young, there are two full-time staff and three part-timers, and an annual operating budget of around $1 million. David Abel, managing director of Canadian Stage in Toronto, one of the country’s largest non-profit theatre companies, describes Electric Company as “the only company in Canada doing that kind of physical and visually oriented work on such a grand scale.” Norman Armour, a kingpin of the West Coast theatre scene, says they’ve been at the centre of a Vancouver theatre renaissance. “I can’t imagine our contemporary English Canadian theatre without their unique contributions,” he says. Electric Company is at once independent and firmly entrenched; in certain circles, attending one of their productions is as unthinkingly mandatory as showing up for opening night at the Vancouver Opera.

Young was eighteen when he left his hometown, Vernon, British Columbia, and enrolled in Vancouver’s prestigious Studio 58 acting program in 1992. There he distinguished himself as a charming and talented young man, but one with an appalling work ethic. He was sent away for a year, and decided to hitchhike to Central America.

Meanwhile, Collier, eight years his senior, had been reading armloads of books on metaphysics, and living a gypsy life. She arrived at Studio 58 in 1991 and played Phoebe, the forest nymph, in the school’s production of As You Like It. Young, newly readmitted, was part of the backstage crew.