Pop quiz: Name the largest multidisciplinary, bilingual performing arts center in North America. Hint: It’s not in the United States. The National Arts Centre in Ottawa, created by the Parliament of Canada in the 1960s, claims that distinction, programming theatre in both French and English alongside dance and music events.

Here’s another: What play received last year’s Governor General’s Award in drama (the Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer)? Hint: It’s a trick question. Two scripts are selected for that honor each year—one in English, another in French. Toronto scribe Erin Shields’s heart-wrenching If We Were Birds bubbles with uncontained rage, blending a particularly brutal myth from Ovid with real-life testimonials of women sexually victimized in 20th-century conflicts, from Nanking (1937) to Rwanda (1994). And in Ce qui meurt en dernier, Montreal-born Normand Chaurette deploys what the GG jury described as “polished, chiseled language” and an “almost surgical style” to depict a woman struggling with her desire to please.

The American Theatre editors’ curiosity about this two-tongued theatre scene and the vast geography it inhabits prompted, in part, our decision to focus AT’s annual May/June international issue on Canada. Chantal Bilodeau, a playwright and translator from Quebec who now lives and works in the U.S., proved an apt guide through these waters. Her article, “Bridging the Two Solitudes” (page 38), traces the logistical, cultural and linguistic barriers that keep Canadian theatre fascinating in its diversity and yet, to hear her tell it, threaded through with loneliness. “Like long-separated lovers,” Bilodeau writes, “Canadian theatre artists must glean information about each other however best they can, and continue to long for the day when they will be able to form a deeper, more meaningful relationship.”

Isn’t the same true for U.S. artists and their colleagues with whom we share the upper half of this continent? Two of Canada’s dramatic bastions, the Shaw and Stratford festivals—not to mention the theatrical hotbed of Toronto—are an easy day trip from Buffalo, N.Y. It’s a similarly short distance from Seattle to Vancouver, which boasts more than 100 professional theatre companies. But Seattleites are more likely to hear about a hot new play from Washington, D.C., than one premiering a 150-mile drive up the Pacific coast.

Sometimes the international work featured in this magazine’s pages—for example, the brave artistic output from Uganda, Iraq, Palestine, Bangladesh, Algeria and Afghanistan, detailed in our February ’12 issue on global citizenship—is dauntingly remote for any reader who might wish to hop a flight and see it for herself. This issue, we hope, provides you with maps for an array of theatrical adventures within reach: booking tickets, perhaps, for the tempting 2012 Shaw and Stratford productions previewed by Canadian critic Robin Breon in his article catching us up on those two flagship institutions (page 32); or sampling the travel itineraries proffered for upcoming months in some of Canada’s hottest cultural destinations (page 42). If you like the look of Edmonton’s imaginative Catalyst Theatre in this month’s “Production Notebook” (page 54) or the unconventional work being done by three Canadian play-development organizations (“Strategies,” page 72), we hope you will soon find an opportunity to chart your own explorations.

This issue may only scratch the surface of the theatrical activity coming out of our sprawling neighbor to the north, but this much is clear: U.S. and Canadian devotees of the theatre have much to offer one another in the way of inspiration. We really ought to get together more often.