Where the human and animal worlds meet: The Bin, at Nextfest. Meet playwright Lexi House

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

“I’ve never written a play before,” says Lexi House. It’s a declaration of artistic intent that weaves itself through the fabric of Nextfest like a golden thread.

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Innovative (by very definition), Edmonton’s multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists returns Thursday to the Roxy. And with it, one of five feature productions on the mainstage, is House’s The Bin, a first play by an actor-turned playwright.

It’s on a scale of complexity, as House describes. For one thing The Bin takes six characters into a classic horror location, an Athabasca cabin in the woods where Goose, a nursing student, joins her university friends. And when things turn dark and scary — “there’s a distinct heavy shift in tone in scene five” — animal spirits enter the play. “I’ve made five custom-made paper mâché animal masks,” she says. “The whole process has been really fun.”

The continuity of the human and animal worlds speaks to House, an Indigenous artist of Mi’kmaq heritage who grew up in Fort McMurray (her family history is part of “the Newfie diaspora,” she laughs). Edmonton, where she moved for university was “the Big City to me. So glamorous, so exciting, so cosmopolitan, it was New York to me.”

She’s graduating this very month with a Native Studies degree from the U of A, and starts on a master’s degree in Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria in the fall.

‘Governance’, she explains, resonates in her new play, as “the process of people working together to achieve a common goal — in a way where you prioritize your relationships with the community, with others, and also with more than the human world.” All germane to the unspooling of The Bin.

House’s biggest theatrical inspiration is a play she saw at the 2025 Nextfest: Mika Boutin’s Televangelists, a play with a raucous punk scene setting, a lyrical sense of childhood, and a dark, violent, explosively Jacobean, sense of horror. “I saw it three times, and I cried every time!”. Horror, thinks House, has a particular appeal for young audiences, “especially in this unpredictable political and economic climate…. And personally I find myself drawn to writing horror; in a weird paradoxical way I can express things that are disgusting and scary. I have more trouble capturing beautiful, serendipitous moments in the way I experience them.”

“What I want people to walk away from The Bin feeling is a sense of gratitude for family and relationships.”

It was while House was finishing her Native Studies degree that the theatre found its way into her life. A writing course with playwright and U of A drama prof Kenneth T. Williams, then roles at Walterdale and the St. Albert Dinner Theatre…. She jokes that the idea of a captive audience appealed to her as a writer: “you can’t turn it off; if you’re bored, you’re stuck there….”

House has found her characters, versions and amalgams of them that is, in “the people I knew growing up in Fort McMurray. Everyone I know there is a weird character, myself included,” she says cheerfully. For Nextfest director Ellen Chorley, one of the appeals of The Bin, which got its start in her annual My First Play workshop in the fall, is the way House has captured that dimensional quality, “how organic the dialogue is. Her characters seem real-life to me, so compelling.”

The cast of The Bin by Lexi House, Nextfest 2026. Photo by Grace Daly.

That was one of House’s goals when she ended up directing the play herself (with her childhood friend Calypso Haine). She told the actors “I don’t care if you paraphrase, or say things in the wrong order as long as it sounds like you are saying it, and it comes out natural, as realistic and in your own voice as possible….” The Bin comes with an dramatic list of content warnings, including blood and death, and rehearsals included fight and intimacy calls. She reassured the cast “if there are any lines you’re not comfortable saying, we can change them.”

She’s tried to avoid “the top-down power dynamic” in rehearsals with “a ‘de-colonial directing method’ if that doesn’t sound pretentious … to make sure everybody is heard. More ‘relational’ than hierarchical.”

“It’s been a very collaborative process. And that’s what’s made it so special and fun.”

The Bin opens Friday on the Lorne Cardinal stage at the Roxy, and has performances June 10, 13 and 14. Nextfest tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

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