Strong performances anchor Sia
Nick (Joe Perry) is a young, idealistic, Canadian white guy in Ghana looking for someone — anyone — to help. Nick would like to save the world, but he’s on a fixed return ticket, so he’ll settle for anyone in the Ghanian refugee camp willing to be the beneficiary his good intentions.
Abraham (Edward Ogum) is a young Liberian guy stuck in a Ghanian refugee camp looking for a way to redeem himself. He’s smart, well educated and selfaware, but life growing up in Liberia threw Abraham a few horrific curves, forcing him to become a man earlier than he should have.
Sia, Matthew Mackenzie’s taut, heartbreaking drama, is the story of how Nick met Abraham, and how mayhem ensues, in the form of a hostage-taking.
There’s a second story that unfolds in Sia, which is about how 16-year-old Abraham, in flashback, and his 11-year-old sister Sia (Monice Peter), grapple with the fallout from the civil war in Liberia, resulting in horrific violence and the trauma that lays the path under which Abraham travels to reach that fateful decision to take Nick hostage in the refugee camp years later.
Sia won the 2010 Alberta Playwriting Competition, and it’s easy to see why: it’s a fine piece of stage writing.
Using three actors, a simply designed narrow thrust stage and a single set (beautifully designed by Neil Fleming) in the tiny Motel, Mackenzie manages to tell a war story that’s every bit as horrifying as anything Hollywood dreams up when it throws $250 million worth of special effects at the screen.
This story doesn’t have the luxury of CGI, so it relies on tried-and-true theatrical standard operating equipment: words, mise en scene and strong performances.
Ogum’s performance as Abraham is stunning. One minute he’s at a nightclub, trolling for Australian girls with Nick; the next, he’s announcing to the world that he has taken a hostage and what it is he wants in return.
And when he’s not tending to his hostage, Abraham travels back in time to days as a teenager in Liberia, helping to prepare Sia for her big moment delivering a speech that might catch the attention of the United Nations.
Complicating matters from the garden-variety hostagetaking story is the fact that Abraham and Nick are pals, although to what degree that has been stage managed by Abraham to create the opportunity that he finds himself in remains to be seen.
For a guy who spends 85 percent of the play’s 75-minute running time tied up, Perry does an equally admirable job as Nick. He’s the proxy for every wellintentioned first-world effort to save the third world from itself: torn between a fierce idealism, the self-absorption of a 21-year-old guy, and the guilt and shame that accompany the self-awareness of having greater value in the world, as Abraham puts it, than he and his sister do, by virtue of race and geography.
Nick might be naive, he might be over-privileged, but Perry invests him with a sympathy and humanity and humour, transforming an archetype into a real character.
Monice Peter has a tough role — the one that’s probably the most underdeveloped —but manages to deliver a heartbreaking performance nevertheless.
There’s a lot that’s difficult about Sia: the violence, the tension, the racial complications. It’s all reminiscent, to a degree of the controversy surrounding the recent Kony 2012 video, which used Hollywood techniques to teach a dumbed-down story about an African warlord. Sia is more willing to travel to the dark corners of the heart, and doesn’t flinch when it comes to articulating difficult truths.