Study Guide: The In-Between: A Play

Lily has always felt in-between. She looks Vietnamese but thinks of herself as white – her parents adopted her from an orphanage in Vietnam. Her parents both have good jobs, but her best friend Brit is always super broke. When Karim – a guy she’s liked for a long time – shows interest in her for the first time, Brit starts to hang out with some grade-twelves who wear T-shirts saying "white pride." After Karim confronts Brit about her racism, a series of fear-induced misunderstandings lead to a lockdown, and Lily finds herself truly in-between, forced to make seemingly impossible choices about whose side she's on, and which friend she's going to believe. Set in a school facing the real-life challenges of immigration, income inequality, and fears of violence, The In-Between is a realistic, complex, and believable exploration of the conflicts students navigate in contemporary schools. Like Youssef’s international hit Jabber, seen by hundreds of thousands of young people across North America and Europe and winner of Berlin's Ikarus Prize, The In-Between brings humour, sensitivity, and a deftly authentic ear to the adult-sized questions all young people must begin to confront as they enter their later teens.

Cast of 2 women and 1 man. Alternatively, one or more characters could be non-binary.

Marcus Youssef is based on unceded Coast Salish Territory, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada. His fifteen or so plays have been produced in multiple languages in scores of theatres in twenty countries across North America, Europe, and Asia, from Seattle to New York to Reykjavik, London, Venice, Hong Kong, Vienna, Athens, Frankfurt, and Berlin.

In 2017, Marcus received Canada’s most prestigious theatre award, the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, for his body of work as a playwright. He is also the recipient of Berlin’s Ikarus Theatre Prize, the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award, the Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award, the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the Seattle Times Footlight Award, the Vancouver Critics’ Innovation Award (three times), and the Canada Council Staunch-Lynton Award. Marcus co-founded the East Vancouver artist-run production hub Progress Lab 1422 and was the inaugural chair of the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Policy Council.

Talon has published his Adrift, Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, Ali and Ali, Jabber, King Arthur’s Night and Peter Panties, and Winners and Losers.

He is currently International Artistic Associate at Farnham Maltings in the UK, Playwright in Residence at Tarragon Theatre, and Artistic Associate at Neworld Theatre in Vancouver. Marcus also sits on SCALE, a national arts roundtable formed in partnership with the Climate Emergency Unit of the David Suzuki Foundation, inspired by Seth Klein’s remarkable book, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency.