POWERFUL PLAY ASKS TOUGH QUESTIONS ON REFUGEE POLICY
How open should national borders be? That may be the most pressing question of our age as boatloads of Africans drown in the Mediterranean, U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to build his great wall, and desperate families make dangerous mid-winter crossings into Manitoba.
Issues of national and personal security, terrorism, economics, religion, politics and humanitarianism also factor into this very complex question.
Mary Vingoe’s important and powerful Refuge, playing at the Firehall Arts Centre, doesn’t attempt any answers but offers a single case study as a way of illustrating some of the situation’s tragic complexities.
The play focuses on a refugee claimant from Eritrea, who arrives in Nova Scotia in the hopes of joining his mother, a permanent resident. Parts of the play are taken from a 2010 CBC Radio documentary about an asylum seeker, Habtom Kibreab, re-named Ayinom Zerisenai in Refuge.
Vingoe has spun a fictional tale around the facts of that case, introducing us to the couple who take Zerisenai into their home, his lawyer, his mother, and another Eritrean immigrant. Each of them tells bits and pieces of Zerisenai’s story.
Zerisenai is an ex-soldier who has deserted and made the journey across Libya, Sudan and the Mediterranean to Germany, then somehow to Canada. He arrives without a passport or any proof the story he’s telling is true.
His mother, Amleset (Angela Moore), insists he’s a good boy. His friend, Mebrahtu (a brilliant Aadin Church), explains to the radio interviewer (Nicola Lipman) how hard Zerisenai’s tried to be “a good person.” His lawyer, Saul (Robert Moloney), is confi- dent Zerisenai is telling the truth. But how can anyone know he hasn’t committed atrocities? His testimony to Canadian Border Services appears to contain contradictions about his rank in the Eritrean army and what activities he was involved in.
The couple housing him, Pamela and Allan (Sangeeta Wylie and Frank Zotter), have their own conflicting opinions.
Vingoe further complicates the issue — unnecessarily, I think — with a backstory involving a previous relationship between Pamela and Saul, and their involvement with the Air India horror decades earlier. There’s also a jarring moment when Saul refers to Stephen Harper’s immigration policies and we realize the play is not about Canada in the Trudeau era, but Canadian policies in what now seems like another age.
If there’s a significant problem with the play, though, it’s the absence of Zerisenai as an onstage character. We get some sense of the man as the sum total of fragmentary, contradictory testimonials. But because we never see him in three dimensions, we’re denied the direct judgment and empathy that theatrical embodiment of a character allows us.
Still, Refuge is a genuine eyeopener, and Donna Spencer’s production gives full value to its concerns. The acting is excellent, and Spencer moves things along with brisk blackouts and jumpcuts across Lauchlin Johnston’s five-area set. One of those areas, the radio studio, makes us gradually realize that for this asylumseeker, Canada turned out to be a refuge that wasn’t.