An important and timely story, but something is missing
Refuge
(out of 4) Written by Mary Vingoe. Directed by Kelly Thornton. Until May 8 at the Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, 30 Bridgman Ave., nightwoodtheatre.net
This may be the era of “sunny ways” in Canada, where our prime minister and premier greet Syrian refugees with big smiles and winter coats at the airport. But all refugees aren’t welcomed as sweetly; East Coast playwright Mary Vingoe puts one such story onstage in Refuge.
It’s a worthy subject but one that unfortunately dulls with a tame production from Nightwood Theatre.
An old theatre adage is, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s not always right — sometimes the telling is the innovative part — but it holds up in Vingoe’s play: the voice she intends to pull from obscurity is the one missing here.
“Missing” is a key word and comes up early during an English lesson between Pamela (Pamela Mala Sinha), a half-Indian woman in Halifax, and Amleset (Andrea Davis), a recent immigrant from Eritrea.
Pamela explains the word “lack”: something that’s missing. Amleset tells Pamela that her son Habtom made the journey from Eritrea through Sudan and Libya into Germany, where he bought a fake passport and arrived in Canada seeking refugee status.
In residency limbo, Habtom is there and not there throughout the play. After the lesson, Pamela reconnects with an old flame, civil rights lawyer Saul (Jason Weinberg) — they had a dramatic falling out involving Pamela’s Indian father 20 years before — and pleads with him to take Habtom’s case.
Pamela and her artist husband, Al- lan (Ryan Hollyman), and their young daughter eventually take Habtom in when he’s released from custody, as his case meets with more and more barriers. But uncertainty creeps into the family with Habtom’s increasingly isolating behaviour. And Pamela confronts her family’s past with the1985 Air India bombing as she realizes she might not be as progressive in her immigration politics as she thought.
The story is intercut with snippets of CBC Radio interviews (a small, repetitive role for Mary Francis Moore), which suggest a tragedy befalls Habtom, as interviewees speak of him in past tense. But the inter- views also give another voice to the person who apparently knew him best, his translator Mebrahtu (Rais Muoi).
Habtom’s absence is clearly deliberate, likely to illustrate the lack of attention society pays to refugee claimants in general and especially ones from countries where, as Saul says, there’s no money, power or oil involved. As a result, the play becomes about Allan and Pamela’s paranoia, and Pamela and Saul’s love story (an unneeded plot point that makes Allan’s discomfort with Habtom appear even more self-centred).
Considering the stakes in Habtom’s case, the play feels slow and, well, boring. The only flare-up of emotion happens between Allan and Saul, out of rivalry rather than anger, and feels forced.
The redeeming players are Sinha and Muoi, the characters closest to the effects of international conflict (besides Amleset, who’s missing herself from most of the play).
Muoi is convincing and very helpful in communicating the reality of life in politically unstable countries, as well as the nearly impossible odds of Habtom’s journey to Canada. Sinha’s Pamela feels like Mebrahtu a generation removed: still extremely connected to her own father’s emigration from Punjab as a Hindu but conflicted in trying to protect the home she’s made in Halifax from unknowable forces.
The story Vingoe tells is important but, like Habtom, something’s missing from Refuge that’s keeping it from hitting home.