It’s tough to separate Homegrown from the controversy it’s stirred up at this year’s SummerWorks festival (I posted links to the Toronto Sun articles that created that controversy in my preview article here), but let’s try.
Homegrown is a bad play. It’s not a bad play because it is sympathetic to terrorists, or because it got arts funding from the city that the Toronto 18 tried to bomb. It’s a bad play because it’s very badly written.
Homegrown is based on the story of playwright Catherine Frid and the interactions she had with Shareef Abdulhaleem, a man alleged to be part of the Toronto 18 bomb plot, while he was in prison. Cate started visiting Abdulhaleem with the goal of writing a play about prison, and ended up becoming obsessed “with separating fact from hype in the face of the uncertainty, delays and secrecy in his case,” according to the program.
Clearly there’s a good story in here somewhere, but Homegrown doesn’t tell it. Instead of separating fact from hype, it can’t separate fact from the playwright’s opinion. Frid’s opinion is pretty clearly that Abdulhaleem hasn’t really done anything wrong, or at least that he’s been treated unfairly by the system. That’s a fine opinion to have, but rather than explaining it or defending it, it’s like Frid just repeats it over and over again, without really backing it up. Sure, Abdulhaleem should’ve gotten to trial faster. Sure, the accusations about how long he was kept in solitary, if they’re true, are a serious matter. Sure, the fact that star witnesses in the government’s case were highly paid informants and probably not the most scrupulous of fellows is troubling. But none of this makes Abdulhaleem innocent, and in fact, if everything happened the way it’s shown in the play, I think he’s probably guilty of his charges.
The parts of the play that don’t feel repetitive feels badly developed. The part of Cate (played by Shannon Perreault) is especially poorly written, ironic since that’s the part the playwright should know best. There’s no real feeling or explanation for why she gets so caught up in Abdulhaleem’s story. The plot point about her long-term relationship falling apart because of her obsession feels like it’s added just so that Cate can rant at her boyfriend in a scene about how “we get the government we deserve,” and name-drop Maher Arar a couple of times, because it doesn’t fit anywhere else. Lwam Ghebrehariat, the actor who plays Abdulhaleem, does a fair job, but has some pretty nonsensical scenes to deal with, including one where he hallucinates about his cats dying without him to take care of them that feels totally out of place. The plot spends quite some time on the stories of two of the informants in the case, Mubin Shaikh (Omar Hady) and Shaher Elsohemy (Razi Shawahdeh), but then reveals that Shaikh had nothing to do with Abdulhaleem being arrested so his scenes are largely irrelevant to the plot. Abdulhaleem says his court-appointed lawyer isn’t competent enough to orchestrate a good defense, but then he’s never mentioned again, leaving me to wonder if Frid even talked to Abdulhaleem’s lawyer in all this. Part of Abdulhaleem’s trial is done on-stage, but it’s compressed in such a way that by the time the judge’s decision plays in a recorded voiceover I was left wondering “is that it?”
The most interesting part of the show is when Ghebrehariat reads the letter that the actual Abdulhaleem wrote to the festival in support of the play. But the most interesting part of Abdulhaleem’s story, as he tells it – the part where he got caught up in a terrorist plot because he thought the best way to deal with it wasn’t to call the police, but to try and control the situation so that as few people got hurt as possible – is largely put aside. Instead, we get “When Cate Met Shareef,” if you will, and if you can forgive me for being flippant over a play about terrorism. Just how much Abdulhaleem knew or did – whether he knew about the plan to short the TSX before blowing it up, whether he really did buy the fertilizer, whether he did anything on the stand besides yell to make the judge call his behaviour erratic and throw out his entrapment motion – is never really elaborated on. The only mildly interesting part of Cate’s story is when she tries to get a copy of some court documents, but is foiled by a bureaucrat in glasses (Hady again). We’re left to fill in the blanks about whether this is shady government cover-up stuff or not ourselves. I’m going to go with “no, probably not.”
Controversies aside, Homegrown isn’t bad because it’s sympathetic to an alleged terrorist, or because grant money was used to make it. It’s bad because it’s…well, it’s just bad. There is probably a good story to be told about Shareef Abdulhaleem. Maybe it’s one that will send ripples up the justice system and make all of us re-think what we know about terrorists and freedom in Canada. Or maybe not. Either way, Homegrown is not that story.
