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by Kanika Ambrose, directed by Philip Akin

b current Performing Arts with Crow’s Theatre & Studio 180, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

November 12-December 14, 2025

Joe: “We have we life”

Playwright Kanika Ambrose finds herself in the unusual position this November of having two of her plays make their world premieres in the same month. The first of these is The Christmas Market opening November 12 while second one, Midnight Schooner, opens November 26. While The Christmas Market is an important exposé of what the life of Caribbean migrant workers in Ontario is really like, it is not entirely satisfying as a play.

Any potential audience members of The Christmas Market should be aware that the description on the Crow’s Theatre website misrepresents the play. It states: “Far from home, three Caribbean migrant workers carve out a sense of belonging in an unfamiliar—and often unforgiving – landscape. In the quiet moments between shifts, they discover unexpected friendship – forging unshakeable bonds through their humour, grit, and shared determination to survive their first Canadian winter. Razor-sharp, funny, and unflinching, The Christmas Market is a powerful exploration of community resilience and the hope created by found family”.

This description is pretty much the opposite of what happens in the play. The three do not “carve out a sense of belonging”, they do not “discover unexpected friendship”, they do not succeed in “forging unshakeable bonds” and the play is not “a powerful exploration of community resilience”. Instead, The Christmas Market presents us with three Caribbean migrant workers who have very different responses to the stress of working in a country where they can be sent back home at any moment on the whim of their employer. Contrary to the blurb above, Ambrose deliberately contrasts those who form a “found family” with one who rejects it.

The three temporary workers we meet are Joe, Roy and Lionel who live in grungy mobile home parked by the Southern Ontario greenhouse where they work. This is the 8th year Joe has worked here, the 4th for Roy and the 1st for Lionel. For all of them this will be their first Christmas away from home because their employer has decided to keep the greenhouse open through the holidays as a Christmas Market.

Of the three, Joe is the most enthusiastic about Christmas. He and Ryan, the female supervisor of the workers, are happy planning a typical Caribbean Christmas dinner and deciding on Christmas decorations. Joe plans to carry on with his family tradition from back home of watching The Sound of Music on Christmas Day.

Untouched by the Christmas spirit is Roy. He just saw a woman who looked like his White girlfriend pushing a pram with a mixed-race baby inside. The closer he tried to approach, the faster she tried to get away. He despairs of ever having the chance to see his baby.

Antagonistic to the positive attitude of Joe and Ryan is Lionel. He is critical of every aspect of working at the greenhouse. He can’t stand the cold, the shelter is shabby and the clothes provided are inadequate for winter. He resents having to take orders from Ryan for reasons that Ambrose keeps hidden for far too long. Joe has a college degree in computer science, whereas Ryan has only just finished high school as a mature student. Lionel therefore thinks Ryan has no right to tell him what to do despite the fact that she is a full-time worker and has more than two decades work experience with the company.

Events come to a head when Ryan reports that a girl has been assaulted and that the police want all workers at greenhouse to provide DNA samples. The three workers, without any information, assume these will be semen samples and are outraged. Though the precise words are never uttered, what they really object to is the assumption that a foreign worker must be the culprit. Lionel refuses outright to give a sample, whereas, as we discover Joe and Roy give in.

When Lionel comes across a legal handbook describing the rights of temporary workers, he is incensed to find that Don, the owner’s son and effectively their employer, is in violation of several terms of their contract. It is not merely the clothes and housing that are inadequate but Don’s racist attitude in referring to the men as “boys” and his constant threats of sending them back home if they don’t follow his orders.

Although Ryan has already warned Lionel that his confrontational attitude will not get him anywhere with her or his employer, Lionel has an angry meeting with Don during which he shoves Don and as a result is told to vacate the premises.

Ambrose contrasts the point of view of Lionel with that of Joe and Roy. Joe and Roy have the view that there is no good in making a bad situation worse. Lionel is outraged that the situation is bad in the first place. Joe and Roy have different reasons for going along with things as they are. Joe has been able to set aside enough money that he has bought land and built a house in his home country. Roy doesn’t want to do anything that will jeopardize the possibility of getting to see his child. Lionel, however, thinks both of them are weak. He doesn’t to care that being banned from one workplace can get him banned from all.

In a schematic way, Ambrose thus presents the negative situation that temporary foreign workers must deal with and why so many of the workers put up with it. What Ambrose never explores is exactly why Lionel is so different from Joe and Roy. She gives us lots of background for Joe, less for Roy, but she gives us nothing for Lionel except for is college degree. We know what Joe and Roy hope for in the future, a hope that keeps them going – but not Lionel. Since Lionel is Roy’s cousin we have to wonder how he could have known absolutely nothing about the conditions of work in Canada before deciding to some here.

We do hear that despite his degree, Lionel could not get a job in his home country, but how can he regard the largely manual labour at the greenhouse as beneath him if that’s what he signed up for?

Undercutting Lionel’s justifiable anger at his employer’s negative treatment of his workers is Lionel’s seeming all-encompassing anger at everything including the weather. Lionel’s confrontational attitude would get him into trouble with any employer, not just one who hires temporary workers. Without giving us any information about Lionel to explain why he is so full of rage and aggression, we can’t really understand whether Lionel’s investigation of abuses at the greenhouse stem from a personality trait or from a real concern for upholding the right of is fellow workers. Lionel should come to some realization when none of the workers sign his petition against their employer, but he says nothing.

As a result of how Ambrose’s omission of key information, the play ends on a note that is far too ambiguous for a play attempting to expose the ills of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. When we see Joe and Roy celebrate Christmas with Ryan, are we supposed to think Joe and Roy are foolish for trying to find what little happiness they can in their situation? When we see Lionel out in the cold having rejected his friends, are we supposed to think he has done something heroic in confronting his boss? There are no answers.

Ambrose’s portrayal of the characters affects the play as a whole since none of the four changes during the course of the action. Joe, Roy and Ryan are the same at the end as they were at the beginning, while Lionel begins in a high-pitch of anger and remains at the same level throughout. Conflicts among the characters are short-lived and soon blow over.

What is clear is that director Philip Akin and his cast have made the best of Ambrose’s text. The cast does what it can to fill out Ambrose’s one-note characters. Matthew G. Brown makes Joe the show’s most endearing figure through Joe’s unshakeable love of Christmas and all the festive details associated with it. One might think that having worked at the same job would get Joe down, but Brown shows that Joe, more than his fellow workers is able to put the point of his work in context. Joe sums his philosophy neatly in his phrase, “We have we life”. Lionel calls Joe “Black out, White in”, but Brown makes clear that such insults just roll off his back.

As Roy, Savion Roach is a person on ever-simmering rage and resentment. Unlike Lionel, Roy’s anger is not directed at the boss but at his former girlfriend who apparently wants to deny Roy access to his child. To gain any hearing from a lawyer, he knows he will have to have a pristine record. Roach successfully depicts this split in Roy between resentment at his treatment in his personal and working life and a desire to be as ideal a worker as he can be.

Danté Prince has a difficult task as Lionel since Ambrose has not given him any other defining features except anger. For most of the play Akin allows Prince to depict this anger through constant shouting. Akin must know that over a long period shouting rather than projecting becomes tedious and tends to turn us against the person shouting when, especially in this case, we should be listening to what he is saying. In an odd decision, Ambrose brings up the reason for Lionel’s disdain for Ryan too late in the action to be explored properly. Lionel is clearly proud of his mathematical prowess. Why, then, does he never express any resentment towards his home country that has no work for him?

Brenda Robins lets us see that Ryan is aware of the fragility of her authority as a White woman supervising a group of Black men. Robins shows that Ryan gets along best with Joe since he is the most positive member of the group. Indeed, Ambrose allows us to believe that Joe and Ryan are on the verge of allowing their friendship to move to a deeper level. Lionel’s late criticism of Ryan’s math abilities comes as a surprise because Ambrose has in no way prepared us to see that Lionel is more educated than Ryan. Ambrose has shown Ryan as so efficient in what she does and so sympathetic to the workers’ situation that we have to wonder how important Ryan’s lack of education actually is. If Ambrose had brought up this topic earlier in the lay, it would have given Robins more to work with in detailing another side to Ryan’s character.

Played as it is in a long narrow space, Shawn Henry’s lighting is absolutely crucial in signalling where to look. In this space the world outside the trailer is only about a foot forward of the space inside the trailer. Scenes set to the extreme right or left of the space requires major neck straining to watch.

Ambrose’s award-winning play our place (2022) is far superior in construction, character conflict and tension. There she wrote about the precarious lives of two Caribbean women in Canada as illegal immigrants. The Christmas Market about three men who are on temporary work permits could be seen as a sequel of sorts showing that legal status still does not ward off intimidation and discrimination. It is a pity, then, that lack of character and plot development make it so much less powerful. Nevertheless, with another play opening in in only two weeks, hopes for more of Ambrose at her best are still high.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Savion Roach as Roy, Brenda Robins as Ryan, Matthew G. Brown as Joe and Danté Prince as Lionel; Danté Prince as Lionel with Matthew G. Brown as Joe in background; Matthew G. Brown as Joe and Brenda Robins as Ryan. © 2025 Kenya Parsa.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.