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by Liz Appel, directed by Chris Abraham

Crow’s Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

January 15-February 9, 2025

Danny: “Saying is not doing”

Crow’s Theatre is presenting the world premiere of Wights by Liz Appel, a Toronto-born playwright resident in the US. Although Appel has written several previous plays, this is the first professional production of any of them. Wights is a play of ideas featuring gripping, substantial debates about wokeness. Its Act 1 is so powerful it leaves us wondering how Appel can ever resolve the conflicts that have arisen between her main characters. The sad answer in Act 2 is that she can’t. In Act 2 Appel gives us no resolution to the conflicts, rehashes the topics of Act 1 and provides an unhelpful and downright bizarre time-warped perspective on the action. The performances are universally excellent, but they can do nothing to right a play that so strangely goes off the rails.

The story centres on Anita Knight, a tenured professor at Yale (where Appel received an M.A. and an MPhil). It’s Halloween 2024, just days before the US presidential election, and Anita has asked two friends over to help her prepare for her job interview the next day to be leader of Yale’s Centre for Reparative Thought and Justice. Anita wants married couple Bing and Celine to be as vicious as possible in their critique of the speech she plans to give. The problem is that Anita never gets to her speech because Bing finds so much to object to in Anita’s decision to state her pronouns and especially in her wish to make a land acknowledgement. Bing thinks both are now passé and will put off the committee, but Anita remains firm. In fact, Anita finds Bing’s objections so vehement she wonders whether he is really just playing devil’s advocate or is expressing his personal feelings.

Before Anita can go further with her presentation, Anita’s husband Danny, a lawyer, arrives home. He has had a bad day at court where a racist judge has set so high a bail for his client that he cannot possibly pay and will likely not be free to see his dying mother. Danny finds the language of the ultra-woke Bing and Celine a ridiculous form of virtue-signalling and the two decide to leave.

Alone Anita decides to have Danny play devil’s advocate and finds the same problem with him as with Bing. Danny’s not playing, she discovers, but really believes concepts that are the exact opposite of hers. Danny particularly objects to Anita’s manner of treating people according to the category she places them in – whether according to race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or politics – instead of viewing people as individuals. He tells her that saying things is not the same as doing them.

Anita counters that words have power. She claims, as per the theory of linguistic determinism, that if we don’t have a name for something, we don’t see it. Danny says that labelling him as White, loaded with all the baggage that it carries in America, hardly takes into account his Jewish background where his ancestors were the oppressed not the oppressors.

The theoretical arguments become personal especially after Danny reveals he has taken an action that will prevent a cherished dream of Anita’s from being fulfilled. Danny has harmed Anita so deeply, we don’t see how the rift between can ever heal. Appel provides three rather too obvious symbols of this rupture. A cabinet door in the kitchen falls of. A salt shaker that looks like Danny breaks. And Danny cuts his hand with a knife. and Anita literally pours salt in his wound.

This, the ending of Act 1, is so powerful we don’t know what more there is for Appel to say. As it turns out, Appel doesn’t have anything more to say.

When we return after the interval, Joshua Quinlan’s handsome set of a kitchen and dining room surrounded on four sides by the audience now features little display cases with artifacts we have seen in the show, like a grapefruit knife, Anita’s speech and a broken man-shaped salt shaker. The actor who played Celine, now made up differently, does an odd sound check before the action begins.

It is November 1st and Anita returns home, presumably after having had her job interview. Danny is home but she doesn’t want to talk about what happened, which appears more a strategy by Appel to lengthen Act 2 rather than a logical response. Bing’s arrival with a new cabinet door only occasions another round of their debate from last night. Bing’s departure allows the remorseful Danny to try to express regret for his action against Anita, but this rapidly devolves into a second round of their debate from last night.

Danny happens to take off his jacket revealing a series of bruise-like patches on his right arm. I assume this is specified by Appel, but only a medical professional might have any clue what they are mean to suggest. As my partner, a surgeon, informed me, this appears to be an attempt to depict purpura fulminans, a telltale sign of a life-threatening acute infection (presumably a result of the knife wound) which can result in death within 48 hours. Since only a handful of people will know this, why does Appel include it in the play? And, since she includes it, why don’t the characters discuss it?

That’s not all. Before Anita and Danny can finish their discussion, the actors who played Bing and Celine, now playing different unnamed characters, enter and tell us that what we’ve been watching is a recreation of the events of 100 years ago “before 2024 happened”. It is true that Anita had said that perhaps only in the future would people understand how to achieve equity among people. Besides wrenching out of the richly detailed realistic drama we have been immersed in, this finale solves nothing since the duo from the future do not give us their perspective on the action. It also beggars belief that a domestic dispute in New Haven, CT, in 2024 could have any import whatsoever in 2124. As it is staged, we have no idea whether this ending is meant to be funny or simply alienating.

It is really quite sad that a play that was so involving in it first act should fall apart so badly in its second act. In retrospect, we can see that part of the problem is that Appel is far too ready to allow her characters to be mouthpieces for ideas rather than complex people. In Act 1, I did notice that although I was fascinated by the blow-by-blow debate for and against wokeness, I was relieved when Appel decided that her characters also needed to take part in a story.

The story in which Anita’s father, also a professor at Yale, left the house Anita lives in to Anita’s stepmother rather than to Anita is intriguing. But Appel focusses primarily on Anita’s plan to buy the house back for herself and leaves Anita’s backstory unexplored. We actually know more about Danny’s background than Anita’s, but giving Danny a possibly fatal disease in Act 2 and not dealing with it leaves us hanging. Appel does give Bing and Anita a story, but it feels schematic. Bing, originally from China, has been offered a permanent job in Beijing and intends to take it. Appel gives Bing speeches trying to justify this decision, but it still seems incredible. Meanwhile, we learn that Celine is pregnant but has not yet told Bing. By the end of the play, Bing still does not know, though we feel he may soon find out. Thus, neither couple’s stories are sorted and any excitement we might have felt for the play is dampened.

This effect is certainly not due to the actors who, under Chris Abraham’s direction, manage to make the dialogue crammed with academic jargon sound natural. On opening night the actors began by shouting all their lines which continued until after Danny’s entrance. Then they began to calm down vocally and their lines become more intelligible even though the speed of delivery was very rapid.

American actor Rachel Leslie is excellent as Anita. She lends Anita a strength of personality and voice that make it clear why the others feel sure she will ace the interview. Leslie shows what Anita thinks before she says anything, and when Anita begins to perceive that Danny’s value system is radically different from hers, Leslie reveals Anita’s internal conflict between love for her husband and dismay at the things he is saying. In Act 1 when Danny tells Anita about the action he has taken, Leslie presents Anita not merely as dumbstruck but as overwhelmed by the enormous range of emotions she feels.

Ari Cohen gives what may be his best-ever performance as Danny, easily encompassing the character’s extreme highs and lows. After he first enters Cohen intimates, even when arguing with Bing and Celine, that something is eating away at Danny beyond a bad day at work. When Danny disputes Anita’s premises about wokeness, Cohen indicates that Danny initially struggles to speak in opposition to his wife until his lawyerly nature takes over and he speaks as if Anita were a student in need of a dressing down. In Act 2 Cohen depicts Danny oppressed by his guilt and feeling he deserves punishment, this is until something flips and he begins a long rant about the social construction of race with historical examples from the Renaissance onward. This rant is frightening because we first perceive it as part of Danny’s anger but rapidly begin to wonder if it is a product of a rampaging fever.

Appel uses the characters of Bing and Celine primarily as confidants for Anita before Danny arrives. In Act 2 only Bing reappears. Richard Lee and Sochi Fried make the couple highly personable and unquestioningly supportive of Anita. Nevertheless, Lee shows that Bing has surprisingly little difficulty in moving to a role in opposition to Anita. In fact, Bing begins performing the role so well, Anita starts to wonder if he actually believes what he is saying. In Act 2, Appel gives Bing an impassioned speech in which Bing tries to justify his desire to move back to China. Lee brings out all the warmth of Bing’s feelings. Bing claims he be freer there than in the US, but we can’t help but wonder why he would want to move to a country that presently places its own citizens in internment camps (Uyghurs), actively tries to obliterate the culture of others (Tibetans) and is staking claim to territory of independent nations (Taiwan).

Appel gives Celine (Is the name a joke?) only two characteristics: she is Canadian and pregnant. Fried is a fine enough actor that she makes a positive impression with such an underwritten character, but we do wish Appel had given Fried more to work with.

Joshua Quinlan’s set for the kitchen features a floor and a counter composed of video screens. Abraham uses these to display dates and times and to show blood that drops from Danny’s cut hand and Bing’s sneezes and to create flutters when tensions rise. Yet, Abraham uses the technology too seldom to justify its presence. A play like this needs no high tech component. Imogen Wilson’s spooky lighting and Thomas Ryder Payne ominous sound are quite enough to augment the atmosphere of danger.

The play’s central debate about wokeness is the most thoroughgoing that we have seen on a Toronto stage. Its dependency on linguistic determinism, a theory no longer accepted, is something its adherents should take into account. Those on the left know that race is a social construct with, as Danny emphasizes, no basis in science, so why do those on the left employ it as much to classify people as those on the right? Appel has Anita state frequently how important language is guiding perception. Yet, Appel has titled her play with a word “wights”, that besides being a pun on Whites, is a contronym like “inflammable” that has two opposing meanings. “Wight” can refer to any living being and also to a ghost or supernatural being. How then can language determine perception when words can be so ambiguous?

Wights is worth seeing for this essential, complex debate and for the intensely committed performances of the cast. As a play, however, the repetitiveness of the second act, the lack of a conclusion, the introduction and lack of discussion of disease imagery not to mention the utterly bizarre and totally unnecessary finale severely undermine the great expectations the first act has established.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Ari Cohen as Danny and Rachel Leslie as Anita; Rachel Leslie as Anita, Ari Cohen as Danny, Richard Lee as Bing and Sochi Fried as Celine; Richard Lee as Bing; Ari Cohen as Danny and Rachel Leslie as Anita. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.