BAKLAWA RECIPE HITS THE SPOT
Cuisine can connect generations
Trump’s unappetizing comments about certain countries of origin notwithstanding, the way to a host population’s heart for many immigrants is through the stomach.
Take baklawa (or baklava), that irresistible pastry characteristic of, for instance, some countries of the Middle East and which now graces supermarket shelves and café displays all across Montreal.
Name-checked in the title of Pascale Rafie’s new play The Baklawa Recipe, which opens at Centaur Theatre next week, the confection also helped the playwright break the ice with the cast and crew.
As director Emma Tibaldo says while sharing a pre-rehearsal coffee with Rafie and the Montreal Gazette: “A big part of rehearsals was Pascale bringing baklawa to the rehearsal hall. It was a way for us to understand each other.”
Mostly, though, baklawa, with its warm aroma and sweet taste, has been a way for Rafie to access her memories when writing about Montreal’s LebaneseCanadian community.
“Maybe for me it was a way of being reminded of my aunts and cousins and parties at home and the food on the table. Cuisine is part of tradition which often remains no matter how much things change and that we can share easily.”
The play, which Rafie began writing in response to the plight of Syrian refugees, centres on the daughters of two Lebanese friends who immigrated to Montreal around the time of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.
First presented, in French, as a reading at the Festival du Monde Arabe in 2012, it also played at Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in 2013. Translator Melissa Bull (Rafie’s half-sister) was then commissioned by new-writing specialists Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal (of which Tibaldo is artistic and executive director), and a public reading for Imago Theatre’s Her Side of the Story festival followed in 2016.
A lot of delicate prepping to get it to Centaur’s table, then, with one fortuitous development being that Rafie’s original (and, by her own admission, loose) structuring was tightened up to make the relationship between past and present more coherent.
“I learned that chronology isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” laughs the playwright, who is mostly known for her beloved 1989 children’s piece Charlotte Sicotte.
Asked how autobiographical The Baklawa Recipe is, Rafie responds: “Actually, this is not my story. I am a second-generation Lebanese-Canadian myself, but my mother is from Quebec and my father, who was Lebanese, was very tightly integrated into the Quebec world.
“(While writing the play) I observed what was happening around me, with my aunts and my cousins. But, you know, what I’ll say is that I’m every character: the mother, the rebel, the young, the old. It’s all the different parts of my life, like not wanting to have children, then having them, and so on. Because the play is not only about immigration; it’s also about being a woman.”
In this sense of celebrating and giving voice to women’s experiences, The Baklawa Recipe is also very much baked in with the times. As well as having been written and directed by women, the cast consists of four actresses (sisters Natalie and Christina Tannous play the two immigrants, Eleanor Noble and AnneMarie Saheb their daughters).
“It feels very organic to have all these culturally diverse actresses, all these experiences, on stage,” says Tibaldo, herself the child of Italian immigrants. “Each of them have at least one parent who has immigrated. Everything that is dealt with in the play is very real to the actresses as well.”
While The Baklawa Recipe, in Rafie’s words, “opens the door to the kitchen,” a full-scale diner takes centre stage over at the Segal Centre in Obsidian Theatre’s award-winning production of Athol Fugard’s modern classic “Master Harold” … and the Boys.
Reviews were ecstatic when it played at the 2016 Shaw Festival, so it’s a real coup that the Segal, in association with Black Theatre Workshop, managed to grab hold of it for Montrealers before it heads off to Buffalo, N.Y.
Set in 1950s South Africa, the play centres on 17-year-old schoolboy Hally and his relationship with two black workers in his parents’ diner. One of the things reviewers have latched on to about the production is the chemistry between the three players (James Daly as Hally, André Sills as the paternal Sam and Allan Louis as the clownish Willie).
“The three of them are just outrageous together,” says director and Obsidian boss Philip Akin during a phone conversation with the Montreal Gazette. “They just really, really work well together.”
Akin admits this sounds like the usual theatreland gushiness, but then clarifies how necessary such camaraderie is, given the material.
“There’s some hard stuff in the play and everybody is in it together and takes care of each other. The way I direct it, I go really deep and dark into things, and I believe when you’re doing that there’s a cost. And if there’s a cost, there has to be an equivalent care to help the actors survive.”
Those familiar with the play will know that those “deep and dark” elements culminate in a truly shocking moment (not to be revealed here) that gutwrenchingly encapsulates the power structures in apartheidera South Africa.
Fugard, who recently directed his own production of the play in New York, wrote it partly as a way of facing the demons that possessed him in his own relations with black South Africans during the 1950s. The premise — and that terrible climactic moment, in fact — are drawn from his own life.
“For Athol, this is kind of an atonement play in the sense that he was Hally,” says Akin.
“There was really a Sam and a Willie. So he was coming at it from the position of his own personal history. I’m not coming at it from that point of view whatsoever. I don’t look at this as one person having the lead. It’s about the three of them.
“The beauty of ‘Master Harold’ is that you fall in love with these three guys,” Akin continues, “and then you see the fracturing of their relationship through actions that can’t be taken back. I think that’s why it’s universal. We’ve all been in a position where we’ve said or done that one thing that you can’t take back.”