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Polly Stenham should know something about youth and the theatre.

When she was 19, she wrote her first play; when she was 20, it premiered at London's Royal Court, the prestigious new-writing theatre that has been home to greats from John Osborne to Edward Albee to Martin McDonagh. And when she was 21, That Face transferred to a commercial run at the Duke of York's Theatre, making her the freshest face on the West End in 42 years.

But as successful as she has become at a young age, Stenham, now 23, is as stymied as her elders about how to lure the under-30 set into theatres. “Our generation is defined by the Internet,” she says over her mobile phone from the lobby of the National Theatre on London's South Bank, where she has popped in out of a cloudy day to take the call.

“It's hard to compete when you can get some quite good comedy on the Internet for free in your bedroom while you're smoking a spliff, d'you know what I mean?”

However, despite the siren call of YouTube and the undeniable fact that when plays are bad, they are very, very bad, Stenham believes there is no substitute for the theatre. “When it's brilliant, it's the best experience in terms of entertainment, just spine-tingling,” she says. “For probably every 50 plays I've seen, there'll be one that I can't stop thinking about for weeks, that I would disembowel a small child to write myself.”

Torontonians not busy watching funnyordie.com in their underpants while high have the opportunity to tingle their spines tonight at Canadian Stage's North American premiere of That Face , a show The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer called “one of the most astonishing [playwriting] debuts I have seen in more than 30 years of theatre reviewing.”

Canadian television icon Sonja Smits stars as Martha, a pill-popping, alcoholic mother of two troubled teens: 15-year-old Mia, who has just been kicked out of her posh boarding school for force-feeding a handful of her mother's Valium to a 13-year-old during an initiation gone wrong, and 18-year-old Henry, a dropout spending a disturbing amount of time trapped in mommy's alcoholic haze.

In all of her work to date, Stenham has focused on siblings with strong bonds forced to fend for themselves in a world without responsible adults.

The mother in That Face is not there mentally, while the father is not there physically, off living with his new family on the other side of the planet.

In her second play, Tusk, Tusk , which premiered this year at the Royal Court and showed Stenham to be more than a one-hit wonder, a 15-year-old, a 14-year-old and a 7-year-old have been abandoned by their own mentally unstable, widowed mother.

This recurring subject matter has made the press quite curious about Stenham's own divorced parents and privileged upbringing in the kind of chi-chi boarding schools of the type Mia gets expelled from. Her late father was Anthony (Cob) Stenham, a Unilever tycoon who decorated his office with his own Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe prints; her mother is a painter named Anne O'Rawe, with whom Polly is cordial but not close.

Family is now an off-limits topic for Stenham, although she says that is largely because she doesn't want her plays misread as autobiography. “I sort of believe there should be a point where it's the play and you die, as it were,” she says.

Unlike the absentee fathers in her plays, Stenham's was closely involved in her life, passing his passion of going to the theatre on to her. ( That Face is dedicated to “Cob, who's watching from the Gods”; he died the year before its premiere at the age of 74.)

Unlike with many young playwrights, Stenham's influences are obviously theatrical rather than from film or television – one of the factors that has helped her plays score with the British critics. “I do believe you do well to know your place and the tradition you're in,” she says.

Stenham acknowledges that That Face has “screaming allusions” in it to Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf . (Martha is, in fact, named after Martha in Virginia Woolf .)

Tusk Tusk , meanwhile, pays homage to children's literature such as Where the Wild Things Are and Bambi , but also shows residue of Williams and Albee and begins like a modern-day adolescent adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter . The girl in that one is named after Maggie from Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . (“I always name a character after another character in another story,” she says, divulging a secret, “a nod of respect.”)

The movie industry is actively trying to poach Stenham away from the theatre: She is working on adaptations of her two plays and another film about the birth of the British drug underground.

But, with a third play in development for the Royal Court and her New York debut in the spring, Stenham insists that theatre is not just her first love, but her first priority. “The plays are the thing I think about all the time when I'm on the Tube listening to my iPod, or in the bath. I find it very hard to shake them off.”

That Face runs in Toronto at Canstage's Berkeley Street Theatre until Nov. 21.