Just saw “Homegrown”, the one-act play by Catherine Frid which opened tonight at Theatre Passe Muraille in downtown Toronto, the first of 42 one-act plays to be presented as part of the 20th edition of the annual Summerworks festival.
Tickets are just $10.
I’ll let you review this and this to get a sense of why a political reporter travelled from Ottawa to Toronto to watch this play. This post is an extension of the piece I filed for tomorrow's papers.
First of all, it was great to be back in a theatre with a notepad on my knee. In the early 90s, I spent four years covering the Toronto theatre season, Stratford, Shaw and the Ontario summer theatre circuit for what was then known as Thomson News Service.
I saw a lot of plays at TPM but, to be honest, the programming at Passe Muraille during my tenure as a critic never really lit me up. I was a bigger fan of what was happening at Factory Theatre or CanStage’s Berkeley Street theatre and almost always at Tarragon. (Tarragon, if memory serves, use to do Daniel McIvor’s work a lot and he’s one of my favourite Cancon playwrights.)
I mention that to say that I’ve seen a lot of indie, experimental theatre — which is a lot of what you’ll find at any Summerworks festival – and, for the record, I’ve seen a lot worse than Frid’s “Homegrown”. Actually, that's being too dismissive. Judged only on its performance and production values — leaving aside some content problems for now — it was pretty good.
It opens with four men on the floor in a prison in orange jumpsuits. One is Shareef Abdulhaleem, recently arrested on terrorism charges. Abdulhaleem is, in real life, a convicted terrorist currently awaiting sentencing. But the play opens before Shareef’s trial and we meet him, in some distress, on the floor of a prison. He’s worried. He’s stressed. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him.
Then we meet Cate who, in real life, is the playwright herself, Catherine Frid. Cate, played by Shannon Perrault, was practicing corporate law but, for reasons we’re never told, now writes plays. She’s come to Shareef’s jail because she wants to see what it’s like in a prison. It’s dirtier, for one thing, Cate says. She thought it would be cleaner, like a hospital. (I’m happy to pass on this tidbit: Touring the mother of all terrorist prisons, Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, a few weeks ago, I can tell you that the part of that facility that we were allowed to see looked pretty spotless.)
Why pick Shareef? Cate’s ex-husband was Shareef's favourite high school teacher.
We see their first conversation, using the prison telephones through a plexiglass window. Shareef, at this point, is a garrulous charmer. (And I will refer to the character in the play from here on out as Shareef and the real terrorist as Abdulhaleem) During the play he refers to scenes in Seinfeld, the old Colombo series and Scent of a Woman. He is about as far as one could get from a radical Islamist. There are only a cursory nods to his religion and no exploration of the ideology or the hate of the West drives Abdulhaleem and his co-conspirators to terror. Shareef is gamely played by Lwam Ghebrehariat, a third year law student at the University of Toronto and a graduate of Canada’s National Theatre School.
The first conversation quickly sketches out the thesis: Abdulhaleem is in jail because he is not a rat. He wouldn’t snitch on his co-conspirators and so, he’s going to take the fall. Moreover, he is here because of anti-terror legislation passed after 9/11. This anti-terror legislation is one of the villains in the piece because, as Shareef says, “the Crown is trying to charge us all with facilitating terrorism which can be done knowingly or unknowingly. I can unknowingly facilitate a terrorist act and get 14 years for it. That’s the law!”
The first conversation has a dramaturgical purpose: Giving us a bit of the back story of each character and laying down the foundations for the motivations that will drive each character through the next 75 minutes. It’s a one-act play so efficiency becomes more important here than an elegant or artful unfolding of these two, one reason that this conversation comes off a bit like a political pamphlet with someone’s resume at the end. Then Cate goes home to her boyfriend, Greg. Greg, for the duration of the play will pop up time to time to be the foil to what will become Cate’s obsession with Abdulhaleem’s case. He remains, through to the end, convinced that Abdulhaleem is guilty of something, probably terrorism.
From there, we’re introduced to some of the other players in this real-life drama, notably two informants that the RCMP and CSIS relied on to infiltrate the Toronto 18 and, later, convict many of them.
Frid wants to show us that, at the very least, there are ought to be questions about the reliability and credibility of these informants. They are bankrupts or drug-users who needed the money the cops were offering them to be rats. (One got $4 million!)
Cate is caught up in all of it and we get lots of windy lectures about the futulity of publication bans, the abusive power of the state, and how important it is that the story of Shareef be told. She gets Shareef to write a letter of recommendation for the play she is working on, a letter she submits to a festival in support of having that festival stage her work. (That really happened.).
She is naïve to the extreme but one of the pleasant surprises, I suppose, about this piece is that the playwright herself is, through Cate, admitting and often laughing at her naivete. In fact, if you ask me, the most interesting theme in this play is not the issue of Abdulhaleem’s guilt or the state’s war on terror, it’s her own obsession with this lost cause.
But if this play really is, as Frid and Summerworks advertise in their promotional material, about “separating fact from hype in the face of the uncertainty, delays and secrecy in his case”, then much more is needed from the playwright. The ‘state’ in this piece is represented by caricatures of the prison guards, security agents, and bureaucrats. They are stupid thugs that are easy to dismiss compared to the charming terrorist Frid presents to us.
And the difficult issues about Abdulhaleem's guilt are completely ignored. At one point, Cate asks Shareef if he bought the fertilizer for the bombs (the court found he did, in fact, buy enough fertilizer to make a bomb three times as powerful as the one used in the Oklahoma City bombing) but, as Shareef’s about to answer, he is interrupted and the play moves on without ever coming back to that point.
The play also has no reference to one of the most damning indictments of the motives of the real Abdulhaleem: He suggested to his co-conspirators that not only could they spread terror by blowing up the Toronto Stock Exchange but that they could make a lot of money doing it by shorting the stock market. Morever, he suggested to his co-conspirators that they could be more terrorful, if you will, if they blew up something like the Square One shopping mall in Mississauga, Ont.
By the end of the piece, Shareef has gone to trial and is convicted. He tries to have the conviction set aside by claiming “entrapment” by CSIS and the RCMP. A judge – just a monotone, disembodied voice in the play – rejects the argument.
The play closes with Shareef and Cate ‘embracing’ by placing both their hands together on each side of the plexiglass window that separates them. Cate leaves. A single spotlight leaves Shareef frozen and wondering if his cats will be ok.
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