Play’s view on police violence is unique

Lester Donaldson. Albert Moses. Reyal Jardine-Douglas. O’Brien Christopher-Reid. Michael Eligon. Michael MacIsaac. Antonio Bellon. Wayne Williams. Byron Debassige. Sylvia Klibingaitis. Andrew Loku. Edmond Yu. Sammy Yatim. Otto Vass. All dead, killed by police hereabouts. All maddened, overwhelmed by mental illness that rendered them either violent or confrontational or disobedient of orders.

Shouting at them doesn’t help.

There have been numerous inquests, task forces, media investigations. A slew of recommendations. And yet it keeps occurring. Some were “armed” — paring knife, scissors, hammer — others were not.

Vass, on that fateful night, Aug. 9, 2000, was armed only with a choleric temper and the delusions of a man off his meds. But powerful enough that, in an earlier episode at a hospital, it took 11 staff to subdue him.

There is perspective and context that should be kept in mind.

Liza Balkan has her own perspective. From her fifth floor apartment window at Lansdowne and College, after hearing yells, she’d looked down on the scene unfolding outside a 7-Eleven.

She did not see who struck first.

“That had already happened. I heard later from different witnesses, different accounts, that he had punched an officer, and then no, it hadn’t happened that way at all. Everyone saw different things. But what I did see was one man being pummelled by two, then four officers, when he was on the ground, and it continued on.

“I’ve never claimed to have more details than I did.”

Those details, blended with court transcripts and reports — boxes full of them, thousands of pages — provided the meat of a documentary play that Balkan later wrote, Out the Window, and which was staged in workshop presentations.

A more fulsome and multidimensional version of it opens at the Harbourfront Centre theatre on June 19 as a feature of the Luminato arts festival, first theatrical project chosen for a supported program between the festival and the centre.

Among the seven actors is R.H. Thomson, who was in the original production. The play has been scored by LAL, an electronic duo, for a 360-degree soundscape.

A writer-poet-actress-librettist, Balkan was a key trial witness. She spent years haunted by the memory of watching Vass being beaten, dying. She then processed the events as an artist, using the transcripts for dialogue. The entirety of the record and, more recently, spending time with police officers — even doing role-play training with cops — has given her a more rounded grasp of events.

“As it continued to develop, the haunting morphed into haunting-slash-creation and how do I investigate it as an artist. Now, as I watch it, I draw it back in from a fascinating distance.”

I remember him sitting with his legs out in front of him

I remember him lying on his side in the fetal position being kicked — OK, in the stomach? But being kicked I remember a baton flying through the air — an officer running to it.

I remember two more officers running in. I remember yelling STOP Four officers were charged with manslaughter and acquitted after an eight-week trial in 2003. A pathologist testified Vass, father of five, died because a fat embolism broke off during the officers’ blows, travelling to his lungs.

“For my money, it still comes down to a use of force issue because the embolism would not have left his leg had he not been severely beaten,” says Balkan.

“In this production you are watching a witness go through and basically be eviscerated by a justice system that disavows what was seen.”

Point of view. Balkan has hers. Syrus Marcus Ware, co-founder of Black Lives Matter in Toronto and a visual artist, has his. Ware has produced the stage backdrop portraits of other individuals in mental distress killed by cops and, every night the play runs, will be on the stage, part of the ensemble, rendering a drawing of Vass. “A 70-minute drawing. Paper and pencil. Very old school.”

Ware believed his impression of the Vass death was firm. But it’s become more nuanced with his involvement in Out the Window.

“I’m somebody who is definitely an activist. I’m coming into this absolutely having a position. But having been in the rehearsals, listening to the verbatim transcripts, I’m left with a feeling of uncertainty.

“If I’m somebody who’s very political and very much about the police shouldn’t be killing people, definitely from that angle, and at the end of the play I’m left thinking this is really complicated actually and what do you do … if it’s having that effect on me, for the general public it will really make them think and question what they think.”

Everyone will come away with their opinion, says Balkan. Conversations will be further stirred with panel discussions at the play’s end, with input from mental health experts, community organizers and former deputy police chief Mike Federico.

The Vass tragedy was a long time ago yet controversy surrounding this inflammatory subject is rekindled whenever a mentally distressed individual is killed in a police confrontation.

“Although this happened in 2000, it had been happening for a while,” says Balkan. “One of the most thrilling things about doing this right now is that the director (Sarah Garton Stanley) is guiding a vision that makes it resonate and vibrate and gives it an urgency in 2018 because incidents like these are continuing to happen. The conversations around them are expanding. It’s a conversation that desperately needs to be told right now.”

Ware: “The play talks about use of force, it talks about targeted policing, it talks about madness, it talks about how the system is set up to fail people who experience mental illness. It references things like the Andrew Loku shooting — 12 seconds, that interaction. It brings it from the past into the present by addressing what are contemporary issues — the question of policing in the city. And the questions around mental illness — how we do or don’t as a society support the lives of people who experience psychiatric disability.”

Round and round in circles we’ve gone.

“There’s always a recommendation for more training,” shrugs Balkan.

Indeed, the Vass inquest made 22 recommendations. The Loku inquest made 39, including Tasers for all front officers (a contentious proposal among activists).

“The Loku inquest, which is very recent, said there needed to be more training,” says Balkan. “But the police officers who arrived and ultimately killed Andrew Loku had had the training. So then if it’s not about the training, it’s about implementation — how do we get them to implement what they’ve learned? When the adrenalin is running, why would that training hold?’’

Mobile crisis intervention teams, collaborating with police, have been established. But often the encounter is sudden and instantly reactive, instantly accelerating rather than decelerating.

It is unreasonable to put all the blame, all the burden, on police.

Balkan: “I do understand that police can’t be all things to all people.”

Out the Window will run until June 24.

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno