✭✭✭✭✩

by Mohsin Zaidi, directed by Christopher Manousos

Here For Now Theatre with Crow’s Theatre, House and Body & b current Performing Arts, Streetcar Crowsnest , 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

March 4–April 5, 2026;

Here For Now Theatre, Stratford

April 17–26, 2026

Marya: “I want not to want this baby so much”

The Surrogate has the effect of a thriller. It grabs you in the first few minutes and doesn’t let you go till the very last second. This effect is not what a person might at first imagine from a drama about two gay men worried about the health of the woman who will be giving birth to their first child, but American playwright Mohsin Zaidi fills the show with so many crises that we barely adjust to one before another arises. While Zaidi does pack far too much into only 95 minutes, the performances are so good and the direction so taut that we don’t have time to notice this fact until the show is over.

The action takes place in the present in a hospital somewhere in Louisiana. Marya, the surrogate for the gay couple of Sameer and Jake, has travelled from Texas where she lives to visit her son, Qasim, now in his first year of university. Being unwell, Marya is hospitalized and Sameer, a Muslin lawyer in New York, has arrived and wants answers from Christina, the head nurse, about Marya’s condition. Soon Jake, a White “writer” who has yet to publish anything, also arrives.

The play covers the period of only one night, but in that time, Zaidi makes sure we know all the reasons that Marya, Sameer and Jake have chosen surrogacy and all the problems they face. We first find out that Sameer, although recently 40, wants to give his mother a grandchild in hopes that she will finally accept his gayness and accept Jake as his partner. For his part, Jake, who makes no financial contribution to their partnership, fully supports Sameer’s desire.

Marya’s situation is more complicated. Her husband has died of cancer four months earlier and she has undertaken surrogacy primarily because she needs the money to pay the medial bills her husband’s illness incurred and to afford to send Qasim to university. What especially attracted Marya to Jake and Sameer is that Sameer is also a Muslim, and Marya is particularly concerned that the child she bears will be brought up in her faith.

The problems, however, are legion. Even though Marya, Sameer and Jake have passed all the psychological tests and signed a binding contract wherein Marya agrees to give up the baby to the Sameer and Jake, the gay couple discover to their distress that the state of Louisiana, unlike Texas, does not recognize such contracts as valid. (Zaidi must have chosen Louisiana for the setting because it the one state where compensated surrogacy is actually a criminal offense and even altruistic surrogacy is not permissible for gay couples.) If Marya should happen to give birth while in Louisiana, Sameer and Jake will not be recognized as the child’s legal parents. For this reason, Sameer’s first impulse is to ask to have Marya moved back to Texas a soon as possible. Christina, however, will not allow this because Marya is in too delicate a condition.

A second problem is that Marya realizes that Sameer is not what she supposed he was. She sees that he is fully secular and Muslim in background only having done his utmost to assimilate with the non-Muslims around him. A third problem is that Jake lets slip, for no understandable reason, that Sameer wants them to have an open marriage. Having come out late in life, Sameer feels his has missed out on the full gay experience. This idea horrifies Marya who sees that Jake and Sameer will obviously not be able to provide the moral or religious home she had hoped for for her child.

With every change in Marya’s condition, the balance among Marya, Sameer and Jake also changes. When an urgent medical decision must be made, Sameer and Jake are chagrinned to find that only the teenaged Qasim is permitted to decide what happens since in Louisiana he is Marya’s only available next of kin. Zaidi must be unaware that there is no jurisdiction in North America where Jake or Sameer would ever be regarded as Marya’s next of kin.

Zaidi’s has constructed the play to bring up a whole host of questions. Is compensated surrogacy moral or immoral? Should the surrogate be allowed to change her mind? Why do the laws governing medicine un the US vary so radically from stage to state? Isn’t something broken in a health care system if medical bills are the primary cause of personal bankruptcies? Should a couple, gay or not, have a baby simply to please their parent rather than themselves? What stresses do unequal salaries make on a gay relationship? What if one partner wants an open marriage and the other doesn’t? What does a person belonging to an ethnic or religious minority gain or give up by assimilating with the majority? As if this were not enough, Zaidi adds even further complications which I must leave untold.

One might say that the play brings up so many questions that it can handle none of them thoroughly. There are enough reasons for Marya to distrust Sameer and Jake without needlessly bringing up the question of an open marriage. Also, in having Marya travel to Louisiana when she is already 28 weeks pregnant, makes the set-up for the action feel artificial. Those audience members who work in health care will quickly notice that Zaidi’s depiction of medical care and Marya’s condition is far from accurate.

Fortunately, director Christopher Maousos ensures that the action moves so quickly that we have no time to ponder the story’s various unlikelihoods and distortions. The dialogue is so rapid-fire and intense that you hardly feel you can blink for fear of missing something.

Zaidi, who is also a gay Muslim lawyer in New York married to a White man, has painted Sameer in the worst possible light. Sameer is still tied to his mother’s apron strings and still wants to act like a teenager even though he is approaching middle age. Fuad Ahmed embodies the weakness and egotism under Sameer’s bravado so well it’s hard to think Sameer would be anything but a terrible father. Ahmed makes disdain of Qasim and of the nurse Christine embarrassing examples of prejudice.

The only fact that makes us think Sameer may have some redeeming characteristics is that such a warm, sensitive young man as Jake loves him. Thom Nyhuus brings out all of Jake’s best qualities as well as a sense of Jake’s precarious position in a relationship in which he makes no financial contribution. If Ahmed shows that Sameer is hard-driven, Nyhuus shows that Jake is just the opposite, perhaps to a fault.

Sarena Parmar gives one of her best-ever performances as Marya. Parmar fully conveys Marya terrible dilemma of being doomed financially if she does not give up her baby and morally doomed in her own eyes if she does. Parmar shows us how poverty can trap a woman as well as well as how Marya strives to hold on to whatever shred of dignity she can to counter the men she feels have misrepresented themselves.

Antoinette Rudder is a forceful presence as Christine. She makes clear that within Christine there is a constant battle between her negative personal and moral feelings toward Sameer and her duty to be as professional as possible. Although Zaidi depicts Christine as a conservative woman who views compensated surrogacy as glorified prostitution, he also makes her the most rational character in the play. Rudder wonderfully shows how Cristine swallows her anger to speak just as much as is necessary and truthful to calm Sameer’s raging and sooth Marya’s fears.

Siddharth Sharma, in his professional stage debut, reveals Qasim as shocked and confused at the position he finds himself in, furious at Sameer and Jake whom he feels are the cause of his mother’s plight and yet wise enough to tap into an inner strength.

Manousos has staged the action in what amounts at an alley configuration, except that some of the audience is seated at one end of the long narrow playing area. Not only are we near Sameer and Jake, but they even sit among the audience, as if we were all in the hospital’s waiting room. In this configuration Chris Malkowski’s lighting is absolutely essential in telling us where to look as the action shifts back and forth from Marya’s hospital bed at one end of the alley to Jake and Sameer’s conversations at the other. Malkowski uses other techniques such as having the overhead lamps flickering to emphasize the characters’ emotional disruptions.

At one point Zaidi has Sameer claim that Canada does not permit surrogacy. What is truer is that while Canada does not permit compensated surrogacy, it does permit altruistic surrogacy where the surrogate receives no compensation other than basic expenses for bearing a child for others. This law is valid nationwide in Canada rather than as a patchwork as in the US.

One could easily walk away from The Surrogate with the feeling that such a process is not worth the emotional toll it takes on all involved. Audiences should be aware that Zaidi presents us with an extraordinary worst-case scenario. The US is not Canada. In Canada 400-500 babies are now born each year through surrogacy due to Canada’s legal and regulated programme which has led to a 400% rise in such births over the last 10 years. This is opposed to a 60% decline in the States due to rising costs, disputes over medical care and inconsistent laws.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Sarena Parmar as Marya, Thom Nyhuus as Jake and Fuad Ahmed as Sameer; Antoinette Rudder as Christine and Sarena Parmar as Marya; Thom Nyhuus as Jake and Fuad Ahmed as Sameer; Thom Nyhuus as Jake. © 2026 Kendra Epik Photography.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com or www.herefornowtheatre.com.