Reviewed by P
aul Leonard
Makram Ayache (Arabic translation by Hiba Sleiman), The Green Line (Playwrights Canada Press, 2024), 176 pp., $19.95.
Caleigh Crow, There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death, Or The Born-Again Crow (Playwrights Canada Press, 2023), 104 pp., $18.95.
Ho Ka Kei (Jeff Ho), Cockroach (Playwrights Canada Press, 2024), 112 pp., $18.95.
Scott Jones and Robert Chafe, I Forgive You (Playwrights Canada Press, 2024), 96 pp., $18.95.
Reading a published play text is not exactly like reading a music score, of course, but the two actions are analogous. In both cases, the reader has to exercise imagination, to collaborate with the playwright/composer in ways that audiences in the theatre or the concert hall do not. When we read, we are challenged to picture what we would see when, for example, Makram Ayache describes the entrance of a drag performer in The Green Line: “She flies into the nightclub, her wings ablaze, she is made of fire. She is like a forest fire, consuming the flora, making way for new growth.” For the theatre audience, such a challenge has already been resolved by the director, designers, and performers.
In a note about the score of her play, There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death, Or The Born-Again Crow, Caleigh Crow insists on the centrality of music to one’s experience, explaining that in the original production, the score was performed live at each performance. She urges would-be producers of her script to budget for live music, since “without the score, it feels like half the play is missing.” She sums up with a crucial observation that applies to all the plays under discussion here, not only in relation to music: “Liveness being the magic of our artform, it also resists archiving, especially in the form of a playtext.”
I Forgive You by Scott Jones and Robert Chafe is a performance piece that is based on the actual experiences of Scott Jones, a Nova Scotian musician. After a homophobic assault, Jones became disabled. His story made international headlines, though, not because of the assault—horrific as it was, gay men being attacked for being gay men is common enough to not be newsworthy—but because during the victim-impact portion of the assailant’s trial, Jones publicly forgave the man who had attacked him. The play, I Forgive You, is verbatim theatre: that is, the spoken words are verbatim quotes from real people, organized and edited, not simply imagined by a creator. In this case, Robert Chafe worked with Scott Jones, along with significant input from director Jillian Keiley and dramaturge Sarah Garton Stanley, to produce a moving and thought-provoking examination of Scott Jones’s experience.
The script calls for two actors who share the words of Scott Jones, mostly addressing the audience directly. They provide details about the events leading up to the attack, Jones’s recovery and the trial. Throughout the performance, however, Scott Jones himself is present on stage, directing the youth choir that sings arrangements of various songs by Sigur Rós. The published text identifies all of the songs and suggests that Jones is listening to the actors and that he and his choir are responding to what they hear.
The only time Jones speaks during the performance is at the end. The actors who have been speaking his words acknowledge that “[t]here are days that I still forgive him. […] But there are days that I don’t.” They then ask the real Scott Jones, “Do you forgive him today?” At this point in the performance, there is no set text. Scott Jones simply answers the question based on how he feels at that particular moment. The published text provides transcriptions of two responses, from two different runs of the show. Jones’s response is followed by a brief and optimistic coda, involving music and dance.
A live performance of I Forgive You must have been electrifying for audiences to experience. The published text manages to be moving and inspiring reading, but it is inevitably diminished. Still, the book is an important documentation of a piece of theatre that would be inconceivable without the physical presence of Scott Jones on stage.
The authors of The Green Line and There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death, Or The Born-Again Crow both performed in the original productions of their respective plays, and the publications indicate that both are deeply personal works. Still, one can imagine either of these plays being produced with a different actor, since in neither case are the authors explicitly playing themselves.
The Green Line is set in Beirut, Lebanon, moving back and forth between 1978, during the Lebanese civil war that divided Beirut along “the green line,” and 2018, as well as taking place in what Ayache describes “beyond time and space.” The 1978 scenes focus primarily on the developing relationship between a young woman, Mona, and her friend Yara, and on Mona’s relationship with her brother Naseeb, as she struggles to find an acceptable balance between personal safety and her professional and personal aspirations. In 2018, a young Lebanese-Canadian gay man becomes friendly with a drag performer in Beirut. Over the course of two acts, the audience learns why the young man has come to Beirut, and why he feels a connection to the city’s Green Line period.
Like I Forgive You, The Green Line is a gentle and touching meditation on homophobia and forgiveness. The text is augmented by a small selection of works—poetry, drawings, essays—by other Lebanese LGBTQ2S+ artists. The volume also includes an Arabic translation by Hiba Sleiman, printed alongside the English text. Even for readers with no understanding of Arabic, this translation provides an ongoing reminder of both the separation and the links between Canada and Lebanon. The book is an enjoyable read, and it will ideally lead to further productions of the play.
There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death, Or The Born-Again Crow by Caleigh Crow was clearly a very personal project as well. Crow collaborated with her husband, who composed and played the music, and her brother, who co-directed and played the crow. She herself co-directed and played the central character, Beth, in the play’s premiere production. The piece opens with the aftermath of Beth losing her job at a grocery store. She is reluctant to talk about what happened, but the audience learns that she engaged in what could be called violence after being mistreated by her employer. She finds a small bit of solace from her mother, who is caring and supportive to a degree, and from a miraculous talking crow who begins to visit the bird feeder Beth’s mother has installed in their backyard. The fantastical vision of talking crows is enhanced by the use of doubling. Having all of the secondary characters played by one actor helps to sustain the sense that Beth is living in her own particular world, and that the destruction of that world, when it comes, is an act of society itself, rather than individual people.
Beth and her mother are identified in the notes as Métis or Indigenous, and this status is addressed a little in the play, and it may be that the talking crow will resonate more for an audience that is attuned to aboriginal culture and mythology. As a commentary on the status of First Nations people in contemporary Canada, the play is restrained and understated, inviting the audience to reflect on the deeper significance of what they have seen.
Ho Ka Kei (Jeff Ho) is an actor and writer, although he did not perform in the original production of his play, Cockroach. (He was, as it happens, in the original production of I Forgive You.) The text begins with something horrific happening to a character who is identified simply as “the boy.” Exactly what happens is not spelled out, is perhaps literally unspeakable. The boy “splinters,” according to the stage directions, and each of the other two characters in the play is a splinter. In an introductory note, Ho pays tribute to Hanna Kiel, the choreographer of the original production, since so much of what the boy experiences is not actually described in language.
Soon, a talking cockroach takes over, addressing the audience with a whimsical-sounding autobiography, recounting his birth in Hong Kong, and his conception at a Whitney Houston concert, and his attachment to a little Chinese baby boy. William Shakespeare is the other major character, who spends most of the play boasting about how much of the English language he personally created in his famous plays. The long discussions between the cockroach and the Bard are full of banter, but as the play progresses it becomes clear that Ho is interested less in Shakespeare the poet and more in the ways in which people are shaped by the language(s) that they hear and speak. The Chinese boy grows up gay in Canada, trying to use his heritage, from both the cockroach and Shakespeare, to help him make sense of who he is and what happens to him. The play ends on a sombre but hopeful note as the cockroach and the Bard edge into cooperation for the sake of the young boy.
All four of these plays have received a handsome publication from Playwrights Canada Press and include useful prefaces and production notes. I Forgive You and The Green Line were finalists for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, while There is Violence, There is Justified Violence, and There is Death; or The Born-Again Crow was awarded the prize.
Paul Leonard began a life-long habit of attending theatre in the 1970s. He worked first in theatre administration and then as a secondary school teacher until retiring in 2017. His writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Canadian Forum, Epicene, Rites, and Canadian Theatre Review. He is a gay man living in Toronto.
