“Relative Good” or “Fanaticisms Without Borders”

“Relative Good” or “Fanaticisms Without Borders” ...
despite some shortcomings is, pardon the pun, relatively good.

Montreal playwright David Gow and director of this production presented at Centaur is an all too real investigation into how easy it is to lose our presumed Canadian civil rights in a world immersed in fanaticism and intent on revenge. A fictional character Mohammed El Rafi or Moe to his friends (Mikel Mroué), a Syrian-born Muslim, engineer, and Canadian citizen, is detained at JFK airport in New York while in transit. Canadian consular officials are unsuccessful in attempts to attain his release and the man’s fate becomes increasingly dim while caught up in a demonstration of security law-language. Innocent people have been arrested, like in the all too non-fictional Canadian Arar incident, (Maher Arar, who was actually shipped to Syria, incarcerated and tortured), innocent people will continue to be detained if they fit into ‘the security-risk profile.’

This is a very personal portrayal of the lack of humanity experienced by the family of a man branded by his name and racial profile as the play puts a face on the political issue of detention, and the fears and agonies that ensue. It is a smart, faced paced and tightly directed chilling account leading the audience in a discussion of what if it happened to you?

Play by David Gow
With:
Don Anderson
Christine Aubin-Khalifah
Marcel Jeannin
Stephanie McNamara
and Mikel Mroué

Directed by David Gow
Set Design: Vincent Lefevre
Costume Design: Ginette Grenier
Lighting Design: Spike Lyne

Excellent casting and a set that rises to new heights at the Centaur (A production where a seat in rows G through M become preferred seating.) helps to deliver this new 'cold' waring nation message to the audience.  Mikel Mroué gives us compelling reason to empathize with Moe with his delivery of pleas for compassionate understanding and basic reason. The Canadian Consular lawyer, Claire Hopkins (Stephanie McNamara) and the attractive American interrogator, Jenkins (Marcel Jeannin), plays "good cop" convincingly portraying the dilemma that his character finds himself in buy having to do his ‘job’ well, of intently never really listening to Moes' truth.

Laced with humor to lighten the dark chilling mood with quips like:
US Agent: “Tim Horton’s…who is that?”
Moe: “Its’ a coffee shop... like Starbucks, but for normal people.”

Ultimately it is the fanatical love and devotion of a wife for her husband that brings Moe home, and his fanatical love of his simple life and endurance that keeps him alive and motivated to survive this ordeal.

This is the one area where the play falls short in delivering its message of humanity. The play relies too heavily on the wordy text to create empathy for the situation that Moe finds himself trapped within. Although the ample heavy decisively political jargoned text seemingly ripped straight from a CNN special on AC 360 like the words of an Obama speech gives the actors all the opportunities to show off their eloquent enunciating chops, there is a lack of compassion for what Moe has left behind in the ‘home country’ where he lives and what he experienced in the 'home country' where he was born, are generally lacking.

Which ultimately begs us to question in the final scene, that arrives all too quickly, in which Moe is reunited with his wife, and he lets out a solitary scream, why didn't she share in that scream? And, what terrible experiences was Moe subjected to live through back in his 'home country'? Gow backs away from the horror that an Arar and others like him must have ben subject too. We are treated through a viscerel monologue to what his wife had to sacrifice in her plight to survive the fight for his freedom, but we are cheated out of what he had to survive and the actual tortures are only briefly alluded to. The play could have taken that extra step towards realism as long as we were treating the issues of 'isims'.

Plays at Centaur until March 30, 2008.