Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical, Studio 1398, Granville Island, Feb. 6-11. For more information and showtimes visit conspiracy.ca.
Say what will you about Donald Trump, but there’s every reason to believe his presidency will be a boon for subversive theatre.
Foreign Radical is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure drama where the audience’s feelings of paranoia, persecution and prejudice define their experience.
“It’s a theatre game with a show host,” explains actor Aryo Khakpour as he readies for rehearsal. “The beauty of it is with each audience … it can actually shift.”
Khakpour plays Hesam, an Iranian/Canadian engineer awaiting interrogation at the border.
Is he a tourist? A terrorist? How many of his liberties can be bent before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms looks like a to-do list Canada’ll get around to when it has a few minutes?
Rather than answering those questions directly, the play elevates the rabble in the pit to the role of dramaturgical decider.
Foreign Radical’s audience doesn’t disappear when the lights go down, in fact, the 30 theatre-goers who file into Studio 1398 may find themselves playing some very weighty roles as they’re scattered among the stage’s four quadrants.
The intention is to have the audience and artists meet on an “equal level,” Khakpour explains.
Originally from Iran, the actor says he’s well versed in racial diversity, but he’s also a great believer in what he calls “diversity of form.”
In the British theatre tradition, the text is the bible and the director is the prophet, gathering acolytes in the form of actors who pass on the show’s sacred message to an audience, according to Khakpour.
“The British drama has been very strong … but to subvert it we need different forms of making theatre.”
This particular subversion likely began three years ago in the offices of the Theatre Conspiracy company, where Khakpour and playwright/director Tim Carlson talked about working together.
“We sat down, we had a couple of beers, and we just talked about the world … what we care about, what kind of theatre we like.”
After exchanging their takes on philosophy and somewhat left of centre politics, Carlson started developing an idea.
“Maybe he had something in mind before he met me, but in my mind, in my story, it was just me and him.”
As Carlson’s ideas of national security and personal insecurity started to take shape, Conservative-backed anti-terrorism legislation Bill C-51 opened the door for preventative arrests. During a bitter presidential campaign, Trump’s ideas of torture as justifiable revenge went mainstream.
“I think the politicians really like what we do and they find a way to support us,” Khakpour jokes.
A wide range of ideas and sensibilities shaped the show, which confronts the audience with Canada’s $15 billion sale of military vehicles to Saudi Arabia while charming the crowd with a high-energy game show host.
“It’s fun after all,” Khakpour says. “It has to be nuanced, it has to be spiced up so people can actually take it and reflect on it, because otherwise they just shut down immediately.”
The show is intended to be as anarchistic in its performance as it was in its formation, which accepted ideas from everyone in the theatre company, according to Khakpour.
Theatre, as the great novelist Kurt Vonnegut once noted, is generally a consensual timequake in which actors and audiences agree to travel through an unchanging terrain again and again. Whether it’s Our Town or The Iceman Cometh, the end is always the end.
Foreign Radical offers the audience a different opportunity, one that even includes changing the show’s ending.
“It’s bringing power to all people,” Khakpour says proudly.
The play is also distinct in that it’s not striving for immortality, in fact, quite the opposite.
In discussing the rise of Trump, Khakpour allows the show is more relevant today, “but it was also relevant last year,” he points out.
He pauses a moment before adding: “I hope it ends up being irrelevant someday.”
