Ensemble summer fest tackles hot-button themes
Try to imagine for a moment what it might be like if you could replace a loved one with a being created through artificial intelligence. Would you choose someone younger, more attractive, or better behaved?
These are some of the questions that emerge from one of the plays being presented at Ensemble Theatre’s Summer Repertory Festival at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island. Marjorie Prime is a sci-fi drama set in the future and centred around octogenarian Marjorie, played by Gai Brown. Like many seniors, Marjorie’s memories are fading, but she has a new male companion, Walter Prime, who’s a younger version of her deceased husband. And he’s happy to help her recall parts of her life.
Ensemble Theatre’s artistic director, Tariq Leslie, plays Marjorie’s son-in-law Jon and Bronwen Smith plays her daughter Tess in the play, which is directed by Shelby Bushell.
“It looks like our world—it just has a certain level of technology,” Leslie tells the Straight. “The overall arc of that story really highlights how so often when we try to fill a void—particularly an emotional
void—with technology, we end up actually feeling more empty, not fuller.”
Jordan Harrison’s play was adapted into a critically acclaimed 2017 movie, Marjorie Prime, which was written and directed by Michael Almereyda and starred Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Lois Smith, and, in the role of Jon, Tim Robbins. But Leslie, also a movie and TV actor, is steadfastly avoiding watching the film version until Ensemble Theatre’s festival ends on July 2.
“I have this thing when I’m doing a show, be it acting or directing,” Leslie explains. “If I know there’s another media version out there, I avoid it like the plague.”
Because he’s not acting in or directing Ensemble Theatre’s other production in the Summer Repertory Festival, Pass Over, he had no qualms about seeing the 2018 cinema version directed by Spike Lee, which was filmed in the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. In fact, Leslie watched it before he read the play in 2019.
“From the first five minutes, I was in,” he recalls. “I was hooked and knew we had to do this play.”
Pass Over, written by Antoinette Nwandu, is set on the South Side of Chicago. Directed for Ensemble by Omari Newton, it revolves around two Black friends, played by Chris Francisque and Kwasi Thomas, dreaming of a better world but constantly under the threat of white supremacy in many forms as they’re stuck out in the streets.
In a June 14 interview on the Early Edition
on CBC Radio One on June 14, Newton described Pass Over as an “absurdist, sometimes tragic, often funny tale” and a “reimagining of Waiting for Godot and the biblical story of Exodus”.
“It really explores the existential and literal threats that Black people face in North America,” Newton told host Stephen Quinn.
Marjorie Prime and Pass Over reflect Leslie’s underlying goal of presenting plays that are about the human condition. He says that it doesn’t matter to him if they’re contemporary or if they were written 300 years ago.
“They have something to say about who we are and what our hopes and fears are,” Leslie explains. “And within that, there is what I would like to call a ‘portal for empathy’.”
By that, he means that Ensemble Theatre plays must offer an opportunity to experience another world, where experiences remain with audiences. “They may not be ones that we are immediately familiar with, but the humanity of the characters depicted should be something you can relate to,” he says.
As an example, as a white person, Leslie could not possibly comprehend what it’s like to encounter discrimination on a daily basis.
“But I hope that there’s also a greater level of determination for those of us who are white to move beyond being allies and being proactive in big and small ways to make the change that we seem to have, for 50 years, always been to varying degrees on the cusp of but don’t ever get past the cusp,” he says.
Unlike most white people, Leslie has had a glimpse of being subjected to racial profiling. It came about because his mother decided to give him an Arabic name after taking a course on comparative religion at the University of Victoria. Then when he tried to enter the United States after 9/11, Leslie, who was born and raised in the Victoria area, experienced a level of scrutiny that he had never before endured.
“I would never make the claim that it’s anything like what anyone who is nonwhite goes through,” Leslie emphasizes.
In addition to the two plays, the Summer Repertory Festival is also offering Sunday readings related to the plays and entitled These Things Happen in All Our Harlems (the title is from a James Baldwin essay) and The Life and Times of Multivac (the title comes from an Isaac Asimov short story). The festival is also hosting film screenings of Do the Right Thing and her.
As the interview comes to an end, Leslie has a final request: can the Straight give a shout-out to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which is the landlord for the Waterfront Theatre? Consider it done!
Ensemble Theatre presents Pass Over and
as well as Sunday readings and film screenings, as part of its Summer Repertory Festival from June 15 to July 2.