A commentary by Dr. Lincoln Z. Shlensky, an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He is also vice-president of Congregation Emanu-El.
What is the role of art in a free society? That is the question posed by the Belfry Theatre’s recent decision to cancel a one-act play, The Runner, which had been scheduled to be performed in the theatre’s Spark Festival in Victoria this spring.
According to its announcement of the cancellation, the Belfry asserted that “presenting The Runner at this particular time does not ensure the well-being of all segments of our community.”
The announcement offered no further rationale for the cancellation, leaving unanswered questions such as what form this putative harm would take, or how the theatre would avoid doing even greater harm to broad principles of artistic freedom by bowing to community pressures unrelated to artistic merit.
We can safely assume, after all, that The Runner was deemed artistically worthy of being performed when it was chosen by the Belfry last year.
The play, written by Christopher Morris, has been performed frequently across Canada since its debut in 2018. It won the prestigious Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play in 2019 and has been lauded by critics like J. Kelly Nestruck in The Globe and Mail, who gushed that The Runner “will make your heart rate soar and leave you breathless” and Jose Teodoro in Toronto’s Now magazine, who implored readers to “run, don’t walk, to get tickets to riveting solo show The Runner.”
The Runner is an experimental play that delves into universal human motives, using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as its deeply riven context.
In a “Playwright’s Note,” Morris writes that he intended “to create theatre that explores the extremes of the human condition.” He was inspired to write the play by stories he heard from a longtime Israeli friend, Yakov Mueller.
Mueller, who died of cancer in 2018, was a member of ZAKA, an Orthodox Jewish emergency response organization whose volunteers serve as standby paramedics and collect severed body parts after terror incidents in Israel.
In the play Morris crafted around a fictional ZAKA volunteer, Jacob, human “extremes” are explicitly presented. As his narrative begins, Jacob (the anglicized version of Yakov) performs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a wounded young woman who, we learn, may have stabbed an Israeli soldier.
The woman he saves is Palestinian. In keeping with the character’s class, religious, and social background, he refers to her only as “the Arab girl.” In one stream-of-consciousness section of the monologue, he remarks:
“I can’t, won’t call them Palestinians, they’re stateless they don’t have a country, it’s not bad to call them Arabs, they’re ‘Arabs’….”
Perhaps unwittingly channelling Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger, whose Algerian characters are only ever referred to as unnamed “Arabs,” Morris’s Jacob cannot bring himself to refer to the young woman as a Palestinian, which could evoke the possibility of a national identity his narrow-minded community rejects.
Jacob seems to recognize this as a disavowal and, more importantly, so do we. But Jacob then continues to argue with himself:
“— OK, OK, OK, I won’t say it, I won’t call them that anymore, I won’t. I won’t do it. I won’t do it.”
What is the “it” he won’t call “them” anymore? Is he coming to terms with Palestinian national identity? Or is he chastising himself for calling her any name at all, other than “human”?
The latter is more likely.
Morris wrote his play shortly after the ZAKA organization announced, in 2015, that it would treat Jewish victims before Palestinian attackers regardless of the severity of their injuries, violating the rules of ethical triage according to the Israel Medical Association, while demonstrating how even life-saving has become politicized in Israel.
Jacob’s apparent refusal to call “them” by any epithet, whether “Palestinian” or “Arab,” that would reinforce their division from “us” may indeed be his first authentic recognition of the transcendent need to honour a shared humanity.
After saving the young woman’s life, Jacob is the target of ceaseless racist taunts by other ZAKA volunteers, who insinuate that he now has an “Arab girlfriend.”
Such bigoted divisiveness contrasts with Jacob’s supposedly naïve humanitarianism; it also ironically reinforces his pain as a closeted gay man whose late father, on his death bed, asked Jacob’s forgiveness for never accepting him.
Grappling with — and potentially learning from — the ambiguity of lines such as those I’ve quoted above is evidently not the intellectual and emotional labour the Belfry Theatre seeks to encourage.
Its high-minded claim to present “ideas that often generate dialogue” appears to be a hollowed out ideal.
In response to serious questions the Belfry leaves unanswered, we must ask: are we not all harmed when our great public arts institutions prefer to approach complexity by simply shutting down the show?
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