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written and directed by Andrew Kushnir

Project: Humanity & Pyretic Productions with Crow’s Theatre, Crows Theatre, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

April 23–May 17, 2026

Andrew: “Are we not supposed to take some responsibility? I’m not saying blame — but, but responsibility?”

One could spend hours scrutinizing and categorizing all the props featured in The Division, the Project: Humanity and Pyretic Productions show, currently on at Crow’s Theatre. Upon entering the thrust-style performance space, the eye is drawn to a writing desk crowded with clock dials, gears and notebooks, all held in the cone of an adjustable lamp. Between the banks of audience seating, wooden drawers and boxes overflow with books, lamps and mechanisms while painted and carved portraits hang on the walls.

The Division is, first and foremost, an archive: a gathering of ephemera assembled to reconstruct the past and allow it to speak. That is, in essence, the work of documentary theatre — collecting traces, testimonies and fragments in order to animate what history leaves inert.

The uneasy past playwright-director Andrew Kushnir seeks to recover is that of his dido (grandfather) Peter, a Ukrainian watchmaker who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War and died in 2018. After discovering that the military division in which his grandad served during the war operated under SS command, Kushnir travelled through Europe in an attempt to piece together a fuller picture of him. The script draws on recorded interviews and encounters gathered during this journey across Ukraine, Poland, Italy and England.

If documentary theatre risks sacrificing theatrical pace for political and intellectual depth, Kushnir’s carefully structured dramaturgy almost entirely avoids that trap. Although occasionally overloaded with information, the piece shifts settings and viewpoints with propulsive rhythm. Voices are juxtaposed, intertwined and, at times, superimposed, offering a vibrating polyphony. Every corner of the stage is put to use, the spectator’s gaze repeatedly pulled from one point to another by new testimonies. The result sustains both theatrical momentum and the production’s deeper purpose — rendering reality in all its irreducible complexity.

Serving as Andrew Kushnir’s alter ego, Daniel Maslany infuses the reconstruction with lucid vulnerability and relentless self-interrogation. Was his grandfather a hero, a survivor, a patriot? Or perhaps a collaborator, a Nazi? This Andrew inhabits a compromised, unstable position, trying to reframe a history that is not fully his own, yet one for which he chooses to assume responsibility. This tension is embodied in a chair he places among the audience. Sometimes he returns to it to watch; at others, he rises from it and steps into the action.

Around him, the other actors (Karl Ang, Ivy Charles, Mariya Khomutova and Alon Nashman) slip rapidly between costumes and identities, conjuring an entire diorama of characters — family members, experts, friends, politicians and strangers met along the journey. The ensemble gives these testimonies dignity and dramatic credibility through swift and precise changes in voice, accent, movement, posture and physical bearing. This is especially evident in the disarming tenderness with which Khomutova and Nashman portray two Polish nonagenarians. Nashman’s voice thins into a falsetto on the verge of breaking, filling the room with its delicate strain.

Thomas Ryder Payne’s propulsive sound design functions almost like a film score, its recurring clock-tick recalling both Peter’s trade as a watchmaker and the pressing summons to take a stand in this divided world. Christian Horoszczak’s fierce diagonal backlights carve the stage into shadow and glare, creating a restless visual texture. Finally, the evocative set, designed by Sim Suzer and Niloufar Zaiee, gives this archival impulse physical form while creating a space in which memory feels ubiquitous and unstable.

The production also understands the need for tonal variation. Moments of tension are balanced by intimate and comic images, such as a family portrait assembled around a puzzle or a satirical Putin figure, played by Alon Nashman with a nylon stocking distorting his face, his words translated live by Mariya Khomutova.

All this raises a larger question. What does it mean to tell this story at a moment when Ukraine is at war and when Russian propaganda continues to weaponize the language of “Nazism” in relation to Ukraine? Kushnir turns that question back on us, asking if political urgency can override moral liability. Through his own moral reckoning, he draws us into the uncomfortable space of a prismatic reality — one that holds in tension all sorts of complex divisions, whether battle lines and national identities, public history and personal memory, inheritance and culpability.

Does this mosaic of perspectives amount to a totality? Of course not. As Peter Weiss, author of Marat/Sade (1964) argued, documentary theatre is always partial, like every act of telling. What distinguishes it is the responsibility it assumes in choosing to speak and in recognizing the implications that choice carries. Perhaps that is why the show’s most poetic choice lies in its frame. The entire retelling of the past is presented as a letter Kushnir offers to his nephew Lev, born after Peter’s death. To open and close with the future subtly transforms the play’s politics, placing the focus on the testament we are leaving behind and the moral obligations we bear to generations to come.

Offering neither comfort nor easy answers, it may not be a show for everyone. It is intellectually, emotionally and morally demanding — draining, even. But in a world addicted to divisions, reality is hard work.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Karl Ang, Ivy Charles, Daniel Maslany as Andrew, Mariya Khomutova and Alon Nashman; Daniel Maslany as Andrew. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.