Without the applause of an audience, actors have no way of knowing how well they've died. Stand and ovate with this GrouponLive deal to see Lord of the Flies at the Lower Ossington Theatre. For $49, you get two general-admission tickets to any performance through Sunday, December 9 (a $98 value). Doors open one hour before the performance.

An unflinching look at the precarious balance between society and chaos, William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies remains a harrowing meditation on the nature of being human. While evacuating from a nuclear war, a group of schoolboys survive a plane crash and wash ashore on an island in the Pacific. The boys quickly build a civilization of their own, in which two leaders soon vie for control of the conch shell: Ralph, who believes in law and compassion, and Jack, who champions the power of fear. Initially the boys heed Ralph’s urging to keep a signal fire burning and to operate by popular vote, but rumours of a beast prowling the woods fuel a growing faction of Jack’s partisans. What began as an almost playful vacation from the tyranny of adults takes on nightmarish dimensions as the children’s fears overpower their reason.

A mainstay of English literature classes and the inspiration for shows such as Lost and Survivor, Lord of the Flies abounds with visceral and iconic imagery. The sound of a blown conch shell. Piggy's glasses lighting the island's first weak fire. The first hunt. The frenzied dance that ends in a murder. And, of course, the Lord of the Flies itself—an impaled sow's head that watches over the play's gruesome proceedings with a decomposing grin. The Lower Ossington Theatre touches on all the book's allegorical touchstones, but focuses its energies on making the book's harrowing plot as immediate and tactile as the boys' crude face paint.