Extraordinary rendition

>> David Gow’s new play Relative Good
takes inspiration from the real life

ESCORTING THE ENEMY: Marcel Jeannin and Mikel Mroué

by NEIL BOYCE

In an age where our language and culture are assaulted with terms like “waterboarding” and “extraordinary rendition,” the much-mangled quote from Benjamin Franklin seems ever more relevant: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

In looking at what the war on terror can do to an average Joe, local director/playwright David Gow adapted many elements from the Maher Arar affair for his new production, Relative Good. The play recounts the saga of a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, an ordinary and apolitical businessman, who is stopped at a New York border. One racial profile and alleged connection to a name on a list later, and the man, here named Mohammed El Rafi, is detained.

Held at a port of entry—not quite on U.S. soil but under their control—El Rafi is, in the view of authorities, “nowhere.” His cries of “I have rights!” are met with a terse “Very few, very few…,” as he is sweated like a murder suspect, deprived of sleep and food, and by turns cajoled and threatened. The Canadian government’s involvement only worsens his condition, and El Rafi is soon deported to Syria and tortured.

But fortunately, as in Arar’s case, the bright spot in this shameful episode was a wife who lobbied tirelessly, and was instrumental in securing his release.

Mikel Mroué delivers a fine debut at the Centaur as the beleaguered El Rafi, struggling to keep his dignity and wits in an increasingly surreal environment. Marcel Jeannin is brilliant as the American interrogator, Jenkins, who admits he’s pretty sure they’ve got the wrong guy, even as he escorts El Rafi to Syria and the certainty of torture. Well-versed in the cruel doublespeak of his job, Jeannin’s character caused someone in the audience to mutter afterwards, “I really wanted to punch that guy.”

As the play shifts between El Rafi’s ordeal and the efforts to free him, Christine Aubin Khalifah as Mohammed’s wife Laila and Stephanie McNamara as his sympathetic lawyer give welcome balance to an otherwise bleak story.

Don Anderson, always worth watching, has great fun in multiple roles, including a cowardly consular official, and in drag as an overbearing diplomat, looking like an imposing (but prettier) Janet Reno. Vincent Lefèvre ties it together with an ingenious Escher staircase set that highlights El Rafi’s bewildering environment.

Gow has made a hard-hitting and sharp-edged script full of quotable lines. There’s the crack made by an American official that in Canada we “hand out passports like party favours.” And Laila, after dealing with consular bureaucrats, observes, “Smiles today are phony. They are negotiations, not smiles.”

It also seems natural that a playwright would focus on the maddening semantics employed in the so-called war on terror. In an atmosphere rich in catch-22-isms, brilliant non-sequiturs are uttered, like: “Sometimes the price of freedom is freedom itself.”

To see El Rafi’s ordeal in a maze of anti-Islamic hysteria is to see Arar’s case and countless like it laid bare. But it’s Anderson’s character who shows what is at the heart of anti-terrorism legislation.

Officially, he regrets, of course, the ordeal El Rafi has endured. But when he retires from public life he will still, and always, regard people like El Rafi with suspicion. Why? Because for the attacks of 9/11, “Someone has got to pay,” he sputters. “Because someone has got to be seen to be paying.”

Relative Good at Centaur
Theatre (453 St-François-Xavier)
(514) 288-3161 or
www.centaurtheatre.com,
until March 30