EDMONTON - “There’s a lot of us ladies in the same position. We don’t make a fuss,” says Jean (Nicola Lipman), the octogenarian heroine of Another Home Invasion, a quiet little horror story now on the Citadel’s Rice stage.

And that’s true of her theatrical presence, too, in this haunting and uncomfortable 75-minute solo play by Joan MacLeod — in which the country’s leading miniaturist creates a frame for one of the country’s most subtle and affecting actors.

There Jean sits on a chair, not making a fuss, surrounded by a pile of autumn leaves, a little island of light (designer: David Fraser) on a bare, dark stage in Richard Rose’s production. As she talks to us in her tart, funny, matter-of-fact way about daily life — in all its homely details of being a caregiver to her husband Alec, conjuring grown-up kids, the Aquafit instructor, a braying health-care bureaucrat — a suspenseful story sneaks up on you. And it gradually amplifies your sense of what “home” means, and what it means to be “invaded,” too.

Home, in its powerful original sense, is in North Van, where Jean and Alec have lived for more than 50 years, raised their kids, finally burned their mortgage. They’re practical people, though; for 27 months they’ve been on the waiting list for “The Kiwanis” nearby. Evidently, it’s the Shangri-La of homes for the elderly since there’s one floor reserved for married couples, a heartbreaking rarity in seniors’ establishments. The way Jean pins her hopes on The Kiwanis will make you wince. Her dreams are so modest: shopping across the street, a kitchen in each room so you can actually choose whether to cook or join others in the common dining room.

Meanwhile Alec has had a mild stroke, and his health, mentally and physically, is deteriorating. More work for Jean, not that she’s a whiner. But will this disqualify them from The Kiwanis? Jean fears, and so do we. The way this palpable suspense is managed, by both Lipman and director Rose, is masterful, since the increments in “home invasions” are so tiny and Jean’s emotional base is a kind of generational stoicism.

The most immediately scary of the invasions, a junkie intruder who shows up on Jean’s doorstep and precipitates the events that follow, cedes to more far-reaching, even scarier, invasions — old age, infirmity and, although the play isn’t overtly preachy, the condescending cruelties and neglect built into a system stacked against her. Under her unsentimental, feisty exterior, vividly conveyed by Lipman, Jean is angry. And who can blame her? She has a lifetime of fair-mindedness behind her, and she’s being paid back for it in debased and worthless currency. “The wool was pulled over” her, as Jean tells us. And now she lives in a pressure cooker of desperation and tension. She’s “worn right out … I don’t mean that for an excuse.”

With a startling economy of strokes, Lipman’s Jean gives us a little gallery of other portraits. Claudia, the all-powerful bureaucrat who holds the keys to The Kiwanis; Bethie, the daughter whose attentions are brusque and guilty; the unreliable granddaughter Amber. … Jean’s world has shrunk. And the final image, in which Another Home Invasion turns out to be a love story after all, will leave you with a gasp.

lnicholls@edmontonjournal.com

Theatre Review

Another Home Invasion

Theatre: Citadel Rice

Written by: Joan MacLeod

Directed by: Richard Rose

Starring: Nicola Lipman

Running: through March 6

Tickets: 780-425-1820 or citadeltheatre.com