It sounds like the setting of a parable, but it’s a real place.
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House overlaps the US-Canada border, with part of the building in Quebec and part of it in Vermont. And during the previous presidential administration’s travel ban for people from a number of predominantly Muslim countries, the library became a place where families separated by the ban could see each other.
Playwright Kareem Fahmy used that very situation as a jumping-off point for his play “A Distinct Society,” getting its now premiering at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.
A Canadian-born playwright and director of Egyptian descent now based in New York, Fahmy says he had been aware of the library growing up in southeastern Quebec. One of the characters in the play lives in the same city that Fahmy is from, Sherbrooke, about 30 minutes from the library.
“I actually hadn’t been to the library myself, but the town that it’s in, the Canadian town, I had run track meets there, and a lot of my friends lived there,” Fahmy says. “When you grow up in the southern part of Quebec, there’s a kind of porousness between Quebec and Vermont that I was used to growing up.”
So when he read an article about families meeting up in the library during the infamous “Muslim ban,” he immediately saw how ripe the situation was for drama.
“Here’s this really interesting setting — this room where I’ve set the play that has this line of tape down the middle of the floor, one side being Canada and the other of the U.S.,” Fahmy says. “The article both talked about how beautiful a story it is, but also how, just as the article was written, it was starting to turn. The Department of Homeland Security was trying to close down this loophole, which is essentially what it was, and create all these restrictions.”
Among the potent mix of fictional characters are a Quebecois librarian, a Black American customs agent who flirts with her, a teenager from a Northern Irish family who hangs out at the library, an Iranian medical student in the U.S. and her father visiting Canada in hopes of meeting with her.
“It’s the story of these five people who are really trying to do their best in a divisive system that doesn’t allow people to succeed,” Fahmy says. “But I wanted to tell that in a way that was funny and deep and hopeful. There’s a whole thread about Jane Austen. There’s a very big thematic thread with comic book heroes and the idea of right and wrong and heroism. There’s opera in it, because the building is an opera house as well as a library. I like to think it’s very entertaining and bright and hopeful while also being about some pretty serious subjects.”
“A Distinct Society” was partly developed at TheatreWorks. Originally scheduled for the company’s 2020 New Works Festival, it was featured in the 2021 New Works Festival Online. Like those workshops, its premiere is directed by TheatreWorks director of new works Giovanna Sardelli.
“I was intrigued just by the idea when he (Fahmy) said it’s set in this library,” Sardelli says. “The minute I read it, I knew that our audiences would respond well to this play.”
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“What we experienced in Salt Lake was that people really are entertained by the story, and also that they came away questioning themselves. How would they have handled something? How are they handling things?” Sardelli says. “I thought that was fascinating, because obviously that’s a red state. Because it’s not really a political play (even though it is), it was able to penetrate past all the madness of red and blue politics and get to something so human.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘A DISTINCT SOCIETY’
World premiere by Kareem Fahmy, presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
When: April 5-30
Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View
Tickets: $30-$90 (subject to change); 877-662-8978, www.theatreworks.org
New South Bay play recalls Muslim travel ban and an unlikely refuge
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