Difficult Territories well mapped
Territories OOO By Niki Landau. Directed by Paul Lampert. Until Nov. 27 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave. 416-504-7529 Sometimes what you say is more important than how you say it.
That’s the lesson to be learned from Territories, which opened Wednesday at Theatre Passe Muraille.
For its first 15 minutes, Niki Landau’s play seems dangerously gimmicky, but honesty soon trumps artifice and what we are left with is a deeply felt and fascinatingly reasoned look at the ongoing struggle in the Middle East. But first, there’s that beginning. Landau plays a woman named Sara who is presenting a one- woman show about what it was like to live in Israel.
Suddenly, from the audience, a Palestinian named Hissam ( played by Sam Khalilieh) jumps up muttering imprecations and moves to the stage. They argue whether he has an equal right to be on the stage telling his story. A shower of new programs that includes his name even falls on the audience. It all rings false, but then something happens.
Part of it is the magnetism of the performers, but even more important is the fact they start to truly reveal their lives. As Hissam says, “ Theatre is about story, not propaganda or rhetoric.”
In a gesture of dramatic complicity that means more than any speechmaking could, they each begin to play a role in the other’s tale. This means that when each character experiences personal tragedy, the emotional stakes get even higher. Landau the writer tries with admirable rigour to deal equally with both sides of the clash over Israel’s territories. It’s not really her fault that Sara’s voice rings just a bit truer than Hissam’s and her tale of personal loss, although less dramatic than his, is somehow more touching.
Khalilieh is a fine performer, even when the script leads him dangerously close to melodrama, and one can truly say that Landau the playwright has dealt fairly with his beliefs, even though they seem to be the direct opposite of hers. But maybe they’re not. “ Why do we hate each other when we’re so much alike?” they ask; the question hangs in the air.
Paul Lampert has done an admirable job of staging the play, once we’re past its opening awkwardness. The scene in which Sara divides the stage into chalk-lined playing areas and tries to negotiate the best spaces for herself, while assuring Hissam that what she’s offering him is just as good, stands as one of the most effective visual metaphors for the division of the Holy Land I have ever seen. Landau is also a nicely complex performer, knowing how to blend sweet and sour, tough and tender, often in the same scene. The play ends with a symbolic tennis match, in which a deft use of projected images of innocent victims drives home the fact that this is a battle that neither side can ever really win.
For that alone, Territories is worthy of your time and attention.