✭✭✭✭✩ <b>
</b><b>by Diane Flacks, directed by Kelly Thornton
Nightwood Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
January 18-February 5, 2017;
November 25-December 10, 2017
</b>
Liz: “Fairy tales to make people kill other people”
Diane Flacks has written exactly the right play to see right now. <i>Unholy</i> is about both the misogyny inherent in religion and about intolerance among religions. It’s intellectually stimulating and, surprisingly given the subject matter, also very funny. “Should Feminists Abandon Religion?” is the stated question of the play to which Flacks, in this age of political shouting contests, thankfully gives a complex, measured, finely nuanced response.
The concept for the show is that it is a TVO-like debate about “Unique Ideas” filmed for YouTube where one of two teams “wins” if it sways the studio audience to its way of thinking. On one side we have the first female Orthodox Jewish rabba Yehudit Kalb (Niki Landau) and a feminist Islamic lawyer Maryam Hashemi (Bahareh Yaraghi). On the other we have a renowned lesbian atheist Liz Feldman-Grant (Diane Flacks) and an elderly excommunicated Catholic nun Margaret Donaghue (Barbara Gordon). The debate is moderated by the intellectually lightweight host Richard Morris (Blair Williams), who is most concerned with moving things along and keeping the atmosphere jolly.
It must be admitted that the notion that one side or other should “win” the debate doesn’t really make sense, especially since the team of Liz and Margaret will necessarily be arguing at cross-purposes on the topic. Yet, if we ignore that aspect of the set-up, Flacks recreates the feel of a live debate with great accuracy and director Kelly Thornton leads the cast to give their exchanges an almost improvisational feel.
Right from the start it is very clear that only Liz answers the debate topic “Should Feminists Abandon Religion?” in the affirmative. For her the Bible is nothing but “Fairy tales to make people kill other people.” It’s no surprise then that she is the one who keeps interjecting satiric jibes to undermine whatever Yehudit and Maryam say. Yehudit, Maryam and Margaret all defend the notion that feminism and religion are not incompatible. All three also insist that an entire religion should not be judged by the acts of an aberrant few whether they be Muslim extremists or pedophile priests. In fact, all three argue against Liz’s cynicism to say that religion actually enhances rather than restricts their lives as women.
The most emblematic exchange on this topic is Maryam’s defence of the right of Islamic women to wear the niqab. While Liz sees the niqab as a symbol of men’s use of religion to enslave women, Maryam argues that the niqab is an Islamic woman’s expression of her faith. Indeed, Liz’s demands of what religious rules women should not follow is revealed to be another form of restrictive thinking.
Flacks has the debate range from the particular – the specific restrictions that the various religions place on women – to the general – the value of faith, the efficacy of prayer, and the existence of a soul and an afterlife. Liz, of course, remains angrily sceptical of all these concepts.
Flacks has made the religious debate so lively and so well balanced that it in itself would be reason enough to attend the play. But Flacks takes the action one step further so that we get to know the speakers not just as spokeswomen for particular religions but as individuals. To this end she intercuts scenes from the debate with scenes from the past lives years ago of Yehudit and Margaret and those of only hours ago of Liz and Maryam. In these scenes we discover what drove Yehudit and Maryam to embracing religion, Margaret to questioning it and Liz, who was born Jewish, to rejecting it. As the action progresses we begin to see a correlation between what we have learned of the four women’s pasts and what points they express during the debate.
The great revelation that this technique causes is that we see that believing or not believing in a religion is a choice. If it is a free choice, as is the case for all four women, it must be respected and the diversity that it engenders celebrated. To make such a profound point about so difficult a topic in such a natural and lighthearted way is quite an amazing achievement.
Under Kelly Thornton’s direction, the entire cast give fully committed performances free of caricature or cliché. Diane Flacks as author does seem to give herself as Liz all the most bitingly comic zingers in the show. Yet, in her scenes with Maryam, Flacks shows that Liz’s aggressive cynicism is also a shield that she uses to fend off emotion. The fact that Liz’s turn to atheism dates from a particular past event does not mean, as it might in a sentimental work, that her beliefs are less real. Flacks shows instead that the adoption of a belief system can have its roots in an individual’s life rather than necessarily being imposed from outside.
Bahareh Yaraghi shows the same is true of Maryam. Maryam’s articulateness and intellectual point of view in public serve to conceal a private sensuality underneath with which she struggles. If Liz’s past impelled her into lack of religious belief, Maryam’s impelled her into religion and particularly into the defence of a religion that in North America and Europe has so many uninformed detractors.
Barbara Gordon makes a strong distinction between the slightly dotty Margaret we see in the debate and her stronger but more conflicted younger self. Similarly, Niki Landau’s makes Yehudit’s wild younger self so different from her self-assured older self that it takes a while to realize the two are the same person. Landau also distinguishes Yehudit’s love-lorn younger self from the angry teenager Lucy whom she also plays, who confronts Margaret about past actions Margaret took in following Catholic doctrine.
Blair Williams is very funny as Richard Morris, the debate’s host, who tries unsuccessfully to keep himself from speaking in a patronizing tone to his guests. In spite of this, Flacks surprisingly shows that the women do actually go way out of control and do need Morris to speak to them like a petulant headmaster to get themselves back on track. It’s a scene one might not expect in a feminist play, but Flacks by then has already demonstrated how rich the lives of the four women are so that to lead them into a public mêlée only seems like the physical expression of their inner vitality and a breaking away from the confines of the debate format.
The artificial aspect of the play is how Flacks has represented all of “religion” through her choice of three characters. A female United Church minister, a reformed Jewish feminist and a Sunni imam would likely have quite different interactions from the three Flacks chose. And in either case, these three choices all represent Abrahamic religions, which, despite their differences, are all closely related. To point out the misogyny also inherent in non-Abrahamic religions like Hinduism or Buddhism would only make Flacks’s case stronger and better represent “religion” in general. Still, given Flacks’s setting of a public broadcasting station in Toronto, her choice of guests comes across as an amusing gibe at the utter predictability of the choice of guests such a channel would make.
<i>Unholy</i> is a remarkably funny and intellectually stimulating play about feminism, religion and tolerance and serves as a balm to all the hate-based discussion of these topics one encounters nowadays in all forms of media. Flacks knows how relevant her play is since she had clearly updated the script by the time I saw it to include the phrase “alternative facts” that had cropped up the weekend before. While <i>Unholy</i> may depict fierce disagreements among its characters, you can’t help leaving the show without feeling a greater understanding for the differing religious or areligious points of view of others. In achieving that, especially in times like these, Flacks has done an immeasurable service, and one can only hope that her play reaches the widest possible audience.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Diane Flacks and Barbara Gordon; Niki Landau and Bahareh Yanaghi; Barbara Gordon, Bahareh Yanaghi, Niki Landau, Blair Williams and Diane Flacks. ©2017 John Lauener.
For tickets, visit <a href="https://tickets.buddiesinbadtimes.com">https://tickets.buddiesinbadtimes.com</a>.
<b>2017-01-25</b>
<b>Unholy</b>