The production named one of the best new Canadian plays by Toronto theatre critics is returning as part of Factory Theatre’s coming season.

Bears, which shared the Best New Canadian Play award from the Toronto Theatre Critics Association with Hannah Moscovitch’s Bunny, will be featured as part of Factory’s “Canada at Your Doorstep” season in 2018-19.

The play, written and directed by Matthew MacKenzie, features Sheldon Elter as an Indigenous oilsands worker on the run after being blamed for a workplace accident.

Toronto Star critic Karen Fricker gave it three and a half out of four stars, and said it combined “ingenuity, humour and the fire of political commitment.”

It’s one of six works that artistic director Nina Lee Aquino says are meant to “challenge and interrogate popular narratives of Canadian identity.”

Also on the bill:

The Men in White by Anosh Irani (Bombay Black), directed by Philip Akin and featuring a cast of South Asian Canadian performers. A Vancouver cricket team tries to end its losing streak by importing an “all-rounder” from India, but he turns out to be “a professional chicken cutter from the wrong side of town.”

We Keep Coming Back, created by Michael Rubenfeld and Sarah Garton Stanley with Mary Berchard and Katka Reszke, and directed by Stanley. It’s described as “a (mostly) true story of a pilgrimage from Canada to Poland by real-life mother and son Berchard and Rubenfeld, both descendants of Holocaust survivors.” The tale of their return to Poland is told with documentary storytelling, archival video and projection design.

The Tashme Project: The Living Archives, created and performed by Julie Tamiko Manning and Matt Miwa, with direction by Mike Payette. It’s based on interviews with more than 30 second-generation Japanese Canadians who were children during the Second World War and subjected to Canada’s internment laws.

Angélique by Lorena Gale, directed by Payette. It’s based on the true story of Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved Black woman who was tried and hanged for setting fire to Montreal in 1734. The 1998 play by the late Gale relates Angélique’s story and Canada’s history of slavery to contemporary struggles with racism.

Beautiful Man by Erin Shields, directed by Andrea Donaldson. This satire critiques contemporary portrayals of violence against women by making women the pursuers and men the victimized and objectified.

See factorytheatre.ca for more information.