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by Matthew MacKenzie, directed by Nina Lee Aquino

Cahoots Theatre Company, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

March 27-April 15, 2012

“Innocence Lost”

SIA is a powerful and disturbing play about the lost of innocence.  This loss occurs in two parallel plots.  In one a Canadian who has come to Ghana to help in a refugee camp is kidnapped by the very person he thought was his best friend there.  In the other a brother tries to protect his sister from the chaos that ensues during the Liberian Civil War (1989-96 and 1999-2003).  The two plots are related more than thematically, but just how is a mystery not revealed until the close of the evening’s 90 minutes.  Playwright Matthew MacKenzie has written a tense, uncompromising play that challenges many of our ideas about Africa and about ourselves as Canadians.

In 2003 when playwright Matthew MacKenzie was only 23, he decided to write a play about the effects of the devastating civil war in Liberia.  On the advice of friends he flew not to the still-unstable Liberia but to Ghana and conducted 75 interviews with young people at the Buduburam Camp, the largest Liberian refugee settlement in the world.  The effect was so overwhelming, MacKenzie found he was unable to write about it.  Only when he returned to the camp in 2007 and saw how the inhabitants were dealing with their experiences through art, specifically the Liberian Dance Troupe, was MacKenzie able to return to his project.  The finished play reflects the dual nature of MacKenzie’s experience--being overwhelmed by stories his comfortable Canadian background had not prepared him to process and the stories themselves.      

When we enter the Factory Studio Theatre we see a stage covered in litter--mostly plastic bottles and bags an a few rocks.  Designer Lindsay Anne Black makes ingenious use of a wall made of full two-litre plastic water bottles that runs diagonally over the stage, leaving a triangle stage right as the largest playing area.   Director Nina Lee Aquino uses this wall to separate the two plots of MacKenzie’s play.  The play begins with a young Liberian girl (Jajube Mandiela), whom we later come to know as Sia Wonleh, telling us a folktale about two quarrelling songbirds who are deceived by a snake.  The tale will resonate in many ways throughout the play.  We then shift to the largest playing area where a young Liberian man, Abraham (Thomas Olajide), is bringing home a young Canadian, Nick Summers (Brendan McMurtry-Howlett), who has come to help out in the refugee camp but who has now gotten himself falling-down drunk on his last day in Ghana.  As Abraham cleans up Nick and washes off tribal markings, we feel embarrassed at the “ugly Canadian” image Nick has given and feel queasy about what appears to be a master-servant relationship between Nick and Abraham.  That impression changes radically when we see that once Nick is clean, Abraham ties Nick’s feet to the chair he is sitting in and manacles his hands underneath it. 

It transpires that Abraham, who has become Nick’s best friend in Ghana and his principal guide, is holding Nick hostage until he receives assurances that a prime witness at the war crimes trial at The Hague for Charles Taylor, whose coup precipitated the civil war, will not testify.  MacKenzie puts us, the audience, in the same position as Nick.  We understand that Abraham was conscripted against his will at age 16 in Taylor’s army and wants “The Butcher” convicted, but we can’t see why Abraham would want to prevent a key witness from testifying, much less why he would take such drastic action as kidnapping Nick.  Worse, Abraham has told authorities that he will kill Nick if his demand is not met.

Alternating with these fraught scenes between Nick and Abraham are scenes played on stage left between Abraham and his sister Sia.  It is clear the two love and admire each other and Abraham helps Sia prepare a presentation she hopes to give when an envoy from the United Nations visits their village.  Students in the U.S., such as myself, always used to be taught how Liberia was founded in 1820 by the American Colonization Society as a colony for freed American slaves.  We were to view this as an heroic achievement.  What we not taught is that the white organizers of the Society thought that repatriation of slaves was a better option than emancipation.  We were also not taught the surprising fact that Sia emphasizes that the freed slaves once in Liberia treated the local population as badly as they had been treated in America, and that this division ultimately lay that the bottom of the Liberian Civil War. 

The longer the two plots run parallel, the more puzzling the play becomes since it is so hard to reconcile the menacing and violent Abraham we see with Nick with the gentle, playful Abraham we see with Sia.  The prime flaw with the play is that MacKenzie does not give us enough clues to tell us that the two plots are not happening simultaneously.  Because of that we begin to think that Abraham has a psychotic personality and to fear that the two plots will never converge.  As it turns out, Abraham is not psychotic and the way the two plots are related is the prime revelation of the play.  Yet, MacKenzie’s technique of keeping the two plots so completely separate does risk alienating the audience. 

All three actors give fine performances.  Olajide deserves special praise for conveying the extraordinarily wide range of Abraham’s behaviour, from innocence to rage and deceit.  Our wonder at how two such different personalities can inhabit the same body is the mystery that drives the action.  His account at the end that explains the connection between the two stories is soberingly effective--gruesome, moving and filled with complex emotion.  McMurtry-Howlett has taken on a difficult role since his character is nearly out of his mind with alcohol, drugs or pain for most of the action.  Such a role requires a bit more gradation of effect than McMurtry-Howlett achieves under Aquino’s direction.  At the same time, McMurtry-Howlett’s ability to maintain such intensity for so long marks him as a young actor to watch in future.  Mandiela is here, as in she has been in other productions, absolutely charming and captures the cleverness and idealism of an optimistic eleven-year-old perfectly.

As with the conflict in Sudan, Sia makes clear that Western powers concern for human rights is arouses primarily when that country happens to have resources the West needs.  When, like Sudan or Liberian, the country does not, the West lets the killing go on until it becomes too extreme to ignore.  MacKenzie also uses the play to criticize the do-gooderism of the West in Third World countries.  The problem is not the will to do good, but the notion that a short stint of doing-good will in any way solve a country’s underlying, often centuries-old problems.  A Westerner leaves his comfortable surroundings for a period of discomfort and returns to comfort with his conscience soothed that he has done “something”. 

What Sia and MacKenzie’s own personal experience show is that the very comfort Westerners live in prevents us from understanding the depths of horror people in other countries experience every day.  Doing good should not be done to make ourselves feel better but to bring about fundamental change where it is needed.  MacKenzie has done this by transforming his experiences into a play that raises our awareness of a forgotten war, whose effects are still being felt, and questions our own responses to terrible events outside our country.  As Sia demonstrates, Nick’s repeated pleas for immunity because he is Canadian not American make no difference to Abraham.  He is valuable simply because he’s from the rich, developed world.         

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Brendan McMurtry-Howlett and Thomas Olajide. Photo ©2012 Sandra Lefrancois.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.