Home is where you hang yourself.” It may be a flippant, throwaway line in Ann Lambert’s play Very Heaven but it does capture the destructive essence of family life as portrayed by these two Canadian playwrights.

Daniel MacIvor, with Marion Bridge, and Lambert, have constructed plays about three sisters who return home under stressful circumstances. In Marion Bridge, the deceased mother is gravely ill, while in Very Heaven, the mother’s ashes are spilled on the carpet in the first scene. These are tense family gatherings, old debts are settled, and long-suppressed family secrets are disclosed.

Agnes MacKeigan dominates Marion Bridge. She’s eking out a living in theatre in Toronto, but acting “is turning out to be a very expensive, time-consuming, and demoralizing hobby,” she tells her sisters. Agnes cannot bring herself to enter the room where her mother lies dying. She drinks instead, trying not to think about Sandy, the father of the baby she gave up for adoption years ago. Theresa, her younger sister, has been doing most of the elder-care. She’s a nun going through a crisis of faith in the farming community where she lives in New Brunswick. Louise, the youngest and the least communicative of the sisters, is depressed and spends most of her time watching soap operas. Their father, who abandoned their mother to live with a younger woman, now wants to see his daughters.

Louise eventually discovers the freedom of owning a vehicle and orchestrates the healing trip to Marion Bridge, the place that their mother enjoyed visiting in earlier, happier times.

MacIvor packs a lot of back-story into this play and manages to create credible characters that are never seen onstage. But there’s an imbalance here. Agnes is complex and detailed while Theresa and Louise seem sketched by comparison. Even so, MacIvor’s engaging drama manages to explore a difficult family dynamic without being cloyingly sentimental or resorting to cheap laughs.

In Lambert’s Very Heaven, the three Leary sisters have returned to the family summer cottage in the Eastern Townships to scatter their mother Rose’s ashes and divide the family spoils. Harriet is 40, has a philandering academic for a husband and a young child with serious behavioural problems. Juliet is 38 and her finances, like her emotional life, are in a mess. Lee, the youngest Leary, 36, is a lesbian thinking about having a baby.

As they rummage through the memorabilia of their past – such as private letters and journals – these sisters are in for a few surprises, not only about each other but also about their parents. Their mother, Rose, was not happily married. “I hated that weekly humiliation,” she confided in her diary, “that allowance I had to give him, like a child. Lying there and opening my legs once a week because I was his wife and we had three daughters who needed their father.”

As with MacIvor’s play, this is a tough-minded “absent father” drama with a significant character who never makes an appearance. But there’s something more technically competent than dramatically compelling about this play. The characters are sharply delineated and there’s lots of plot and conflict, but it feels more like television than theatre.