Playwright and director Kareem Fahmy has a terrific setting and concept for a great play, writes critic Chris Jones. But as of now, the characters feel not so much like complex humans but symbols for the authorial point of view.
Kate Fry, Amir Abdullah and Aila Ayilam Peck in"A Distinct Society" at Writers Theatre in Glencoe.in the Atlas Obscura online travel magazine about a fascinating place with a couch in Vermont and a bookshelf in Quebec: the Haskell Free Library and Opera House. Improbably, Haskell wrote, this unusual place “remains a transnational space that residents from both the U.S. and Canada can enter without a passport.”How? Why? The border between the U.S.
Perhaps the playwright and director Kareem Fahmy read Yahm’s piece as he penned “A Distinct Society,” the latest show at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. Certainly, the librarian at the core of the piece, has explanatory lines that are very close to what Yahm wrote: the library was born of a border quirk and of the determination of the residents of Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, to live as if their two communities were one town.
Part of the problem is that some of the play is devoted to a romance between Manon, a quietly subversive librarian, as is usually true in theater, and Bruce, even though that makes for one unlikely couple . The problem is that Fahmy doesn’t want the audience to sympathize with an immigration official so he makes Bruce problematic, to say the least, even pulling out a gun at one point. It’s thus mighty tough to believe Manon would fall for him.
You also have to swallow that there is only one border guard in this world and no other patrons in the library. Some of that is a reasonable ask of an audience, but the play has no clear temporal referent. We don’t know what moment this is in America’s fraught border history and, given that the play is otherwise entirely rooted in realism, that further perplexes.
To put all this more simply: the script, which is too long for a one-act, needs a lot of work and, although there are some strong actors in the piece and some potent moments, it generally behooves new writers not to direct their own promising works in progress. Better to step back, stand on both sides of the border and decide whose story you really want to tell.
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