Binti’s Journey is a play about many things. It gives faces and names to the AIDS epidemic in Africa — sometimes numbingly anonymous in its scale — while also managing to be about the end of innocence. Degrassi: The Next Generation actor Jajube Mandiela brings a touching naivety to Binti, the work’s teen narrator, that gives her story both pathos and humour.

This production is a remount of one that played in Toronto last year to overwhelmingly positive reviews, but with an amended script that allows the Binti from the story’s end to comment on her own development before the action begins.

The play is a faithful adaptation of the young adult novel The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis, managing to fit in most of the novel’s events and characters without feeling rushed. Produced by Theatre Direct, which specializes in theatre for young audiences, Binti’s Journey challenges perceptions of AIDS in a way that is educational without being preachy. Adults as well as children will be taken with its characters’ energy and its simple yet evocative set design.

Instead of assaulting its audience with the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, these are the backdrop against which everything else is staged. We are made aware of the scale of the crisis in increments as Binti comes to understand the ordinariness of her own family’s tragedy — a device that is ultimately much more affecting.