Refugee sagas and annals of exile are as old (at least!) as the Old Testament. Way back in Genesis, we find a pair of messenger angels hustling the Biblical patriarch Lot and his womenfolk out of their house in iniquitous Sodom. "Escape for thy life," the angels warn. "Look not behind thee … lest thou be swept away."
Easier said than done, at least for Mrs. Lot (nameless in the Bible), who can’t help casting a backward glance at the rain of brimstone engulfing her homeland. For this all-too-human lapse, God turns her into a pillar of salt.
To our abiding human sorrow and shame, the story remains as pertinent as ever in our own time, as attested by three brilliant exile dramas highlighting this year’s PuSh Fest bill. All three of these vivid productions feature bravura music and dance. Yet all three leave a distinctly salty aftertaste.
In playwright Carmen Aguirre’s Anywhere But Here, the “salt” is delivered in the form of “foul language, brief nudity, mature subject matter, fake guns … [and] limited stage violence,” as listed in the “Audience Advice” of the program notes. All this salt to help us bolt down a high-octane tequila shot; the searing, tragic saga of LatinX South-to-North dislocation.
In the lobby of the Vancouver Playhouse, where the show World Premieres February 4-15, an audience-participation shrine commemorates the deadly toll of these mass migrations. A timeline unfurls alongside, running from the Spanish conquista all the way down to Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Wall” and its attendant concentration camps, detailing LatinX hegiras, wave after wave.
In the first such wave to be accorded refugee status in Canada, Aguirre and her family landed up here in the early 1970’s, after Pierre Trudeau’s government – under pressure of sustained protests – dialed back (a little) its embrace of the CIA-sponsored military coup that overthrew Chile’s elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende.
Like Lot’s wife, the Aguirre’s could not help looking back towards their lost homeland even as they adapted to their new milieu. It's this dilemma, finctionalised, that propels the action of Anywhere But Here.
The play (or at least its outermost "shell story") is set in1979, with the coup and the resulting exile still a fresh, raw wound. The estranged Dad of a family hijacks his two daughters and sets out on a road trip back from Canada back to Chile, with the Mom in hot pursuit.
But it’s a LatinX story, after all, with plenty of latitude for chronology-bending realismo mágico. Racing southwards to the US/Mexico border, the 1970’s exiles run smack up against the Donald Trump's Great Wall of MAGA.
And skulking, scrambling and dodging their way northwards towards the same wall comes a file of very 21st century asylum-seekers. This "caravan" is spearheaded by a Honduran rapper (Alen Dominguez) who chronicles their travails in rat-a-tat-rhyme.
The hip-hop lyrics are the only part of the eloquent script that Aguirre did not pen entirely on her own. For those hectoring cadences., she turned to a Juno-. Emmy- and Peabody-certified collaborator: rap laureate and broadcast curator, Shad Kabango.
LatinX he’s not, but Shad knows his way around the refugee experience, as a Kenya-born Rwandan shunted “all over East Africa” before settling at last in Ontario. And, anyway, the rest of the show’s production team more than makes up for LatinX bona fides, starting with Mexico-born Los Angeles-based director Juliette Carillo.
Switching and swapping roles throughout the show, the nine member cast -- Augusto Bitter, Alen Dominguez, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Shawn Lall, Nadeem Phillip, Christine Quintana, Michelle Rios, AJ Simmons, and Manuela Sosa – boast immigrant roots ranging from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, El Salvador, Venezuela to Puerto Rico. Other Mexico-born luminaries on the crew include costume designer Carmen Alatorre, projections designer Candelario Andrade and set designer Christopher Acebo.
Between them, these ChicanX production superstars melded their talents for a compelling mise en scene – a circular performance space, covered in cork fragments (to suggest desert grit) and backed by a cyclorama of shifting colours. It’s marked at the base with the beckoning lights of a distant urban haven, but the sky above is streaked with projected footage of the hardships of the road and the legacies of the past.
History and magic realism infuse the costumes, too, with ancestors from bygone generations cropping up in period garb, dia de las muertos face paint or flamboyantly flapping giant monarch butterfly suits, often dangling from a 40’ floor-to-ceiling circus ladder at centre stage. It’s a grand-scale production, making full use of the Playhouse’s mainstage resources.
But if Anywhere But Here presents a spectacular Big Top extravaganza, playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s Old Stock manages to pack many of the same exile themes into a compact show-in-a-box. Literally.
Entering UBC’s Frederic Wood Theatre, we’re greeted with the blank face of a proscenium-filling freight container. No signs of life until a the show’s star and co-creator, Ben Caplan, pops out of the container’s lid to greet us – top-hatted, full-bearded and googly eyed, like a manic Jack-in-the-Box.
And he keeps right on jiggling, jouncing, crooning, swooning, prating or orating for pretty much the whole uninterrupted 85 minute show, even after the container’s front panels swing open to reveal an array of props and puppets plus a klezmer quartet.
Two of the combo players, violinist Shaina Silver-Baird and clarinetist Eric Da Costa, double as the Moscovich ancestors alluded to in the show’s sub-title, A Refugee Love Story. They bring out their characters poignantly, shuttling between musicianship and acting roles with impressive virtuosity.
But it’s still and always Caplan who holds uncontested sway. He’s equally at home delivering witty patter songs, C&W thud-puckery, cantorial wails, a bitter-sweet lullaby, accusatory punk-inflected howls or a chilling pogrom narrative. All pickled with way more than a grain of salt. Kosher salt, that is, a rich brine of Yiddishkeit.
Impressive as it is as a testimonial to his performative versatility, Caplan’s eclectic repertoire could all too easily have dissolved into a random grab bag of original compositions. Credit director Christian Barry for stringing it all together on the narrative thread of the Moscovitch grandparents and their Romania-to-Montreal hegira. In the process, Barry seems to have gotten his hands into multiple aspects of production; he shares co-credits for scripting, sets and lighting.
Fake News, 1934. Image: Diamond's Edge Photography:
City Opera, in its 2020 PuSh Fest offering, Berlin 1934, mines its salt underground. To set the scene, stage-and-lighting designer John Webber has construed Granville Island’s cavernous Performance Works into an abandoned warehouse where we, the audience, sit huddled around makeshift plywood tables for the last gasp of Germany’s once-thriving Weimar-era cabaret scene.
Tomorrow, the premise goes, the city’s last cabaret troupe will disband and its five surviving performers (one’s already been “disappeared”) will wend their several ways into exile, Nazi collaboration, resistance or the Hitler’s death camps. But tonight, we’re treated to one final round of their signature shtick.
So we get vamping tangos and torch songs from the troupe’s diva and proprietress (Meaghan Chenosky), cutesy/kinky soft shoe numbers from the gender-bending duo of Alen Dominguez and Julia Munčs, heart-throb ballads from the dapper leading man (Daniel Doerksen) and soulful ruminations from the Jewish “second banana,” Brent Hirose.
But as the evening goes on, the selections get edgier and angstier – a swaggering “Song of the Big Shot,” a drumbeat tattoo, a trampling “Dressage,” a satiric farrago of anti-Semitism – before settling back into a a note of rueful foreboding.
Twenty songs in all, from the actual repertoire of German cabarets in the 1920’s and 30’s, carefully culled, researched and arranged by music director Roger Parton (who also performed on keyboard and led the live quartet of woodwind, string and percussion accompanists).
Some of the music and lyric credits list names that are still well-known, viz. Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weil. But most of the songs come from now (unjustly) forgotten composers like Hanns Eisler, Mischa Solansky and Frederick Hollander.
All 20 songs share in the characteristic saltiness (not to say cynicism) of the late-Weimar zeitgeist; all the more piquant considering the refugee fates – or worse – awaiting their original creators and performers.
Stage director Alan Corbishley, who first conceived the project, recounts in a post-show talk how he helped sift through over a hundred “lost” musical scores to exhume this selection of “important, yet disturbingly timely songs.”
Dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel, in her program note, sets out to counter some all-too-common notions of the Holocaust as “innocuous and unchallenging suffering.” Rather she hopes to celebrate “resistance…some [of it] vulgar, oblique and funny…[that] wobbles its way…to a salacious solidarity.”
City Opera artistic director Charles Barber is even more explicit: “Our objective in Berlin is to examine the rise of fascism through the manufacture of consent…If this sounds familiar, it should. If it sounds contemporary, it is.”