Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
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written by Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia & Marcus Youssef, directed by Guillermo Verdecchia
Cahoots Theatre Company, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
September 30-October 17, 2010
Is it possible to create a satire about the lack of change? On the evidence of Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings the answer is “No.” When Ali and Ali last visited Toronto it was in 2004 with their show The Axes of Evil, where the clear focus was George W. Bush and the “war on terror.” Now the election of Barack Obama on a platform of “hope and change” seems to have pulled the carpet from under them. There are still important wrongs to criticize, but they do this in an utterly serious way. What comedy remains is weak and unfocussed.
The premise of the 80-minute show is that Ali Ababwa (Marcus Youssef) and Ali Hakim (Guillermo Verdecchia) are staging a show show called Yo Mama, Osbama, or How I Stopped Worrying and Came to Love the Half-Black President. Their play is meant to demonstrate how everything really did change on the night Obama was elected. Two points not emphasized enough are: 1) that as far as Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay are concerned, not much did change and 2) that while the US may have gained a liberal leader, Canada has a conservative prime minister who continues Bush’s mindset. The Alis’ show comes to a halt when RCMP Constable Dhaliwal (Anita Majumdar) enters and accuses the two of funding the Agrabanian People’s Front, that Canada views as a terrorist organization. She immediately begins hearings to deport the pair not to their native (fictional) Agraba, which is a war zone, but to hostile (fictional) Azerbaijanistan.
The satire of the Central Asians’ knowledge of the West through popular culture is mildly amusing in a Borat-lite kind of way. Calling Obama a “mulatto” and their assistant (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) “yellow” shows the Alis are hardly free of racism. Majumdar really nails the tougher-than-a-man attitude of some female government officials. Yet, when the real point of the show surfaces--the continued deaths of Canadians in Afghanistan and the detention of five men without trial in Kingston Penitentiary, all pretence of comedy drops. Even Ali Hakim’s story of his family left back home is not comic. The abrupt change of tone suggests that fluffy satire does not actually suit the injustices the authors wish to condemn. After this cold dose of reality, it’s hard to care much about the Alis’ fictional problems or laugh at their absurd solutions.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-10-01.
Photo: Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef. ©Alex Felipe.
2010-10-01
Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings