Justice, post 9/11

David Gow says Relative Good is not a docudrama about Maher Arar - but a lot sounds familiar

Pat Donnelly
Montreal Gazette
Saturday, February 23 2008

David Gow wants to make one thing perfectly clear. His play, Relative Good, may be about a Canadian engineer of Middle Eastern background who is arrested at JFK Airport, flown to Syria, incarcerated, then tortured, but it is not a docudrama about Maher Arar, the Canadian engineer who was arrested in JFK airport, flown to Syria, incarcerated, tortured, and eventually released, exonerated and awarded $11.5 million in compensation for miscarried justice. No. No. No.

Well, not exactly.

"I was looking at the Arar story and other stories like his," Gow explained over a morning coffee in the Centaur Theatre lobby this week. But he went his own way with the material. For example: "The couple in the play are not observant Muslims (Arar credits his faith as well as his steadfast wife, Monia Mazigh, with saving him)." And Gow's character spends only nine months in captivity. Arar spent over a year under arrest in Syria.

There are other differences, too. "Because I felt I couldn't accurately tell his story without sitting with him at great length, etc. And then I thought it might be kind of an obscene thing to try to tell this man's story. Because it's such an obscene story."

Out of respect for Arar, rather than risk distorting his story in the wrong way "through the lens of biography," Gow chose to "distort it completely through a fictive lens and then refer to it as such." This would allow him to explore the wider issue of "what's happening for people of Middle Eastern origin who find themselves in this situation."

Gow sees the Arar case as an extreme example of racial profiling. "Arar himself was quick to point out that there were a number of others like him," he said. Some were Canadian, dozens have been American.

Relative Good was first produced as a CBC Radio drama in 2005, then premiered on stage under the direction of Michael Shamata at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa later that same year.

At the time, the parliamentary inquiry into Arar's case was still ongoing. "The details of the case were not readily publicly available, certainly not when I was writing the thing in 2004-05," he said. "There was a lot of stuff that just wasn't known."

But to Gow's surprise, some of what he had imagined landed uncannily close to the facts which subsequently emerged. "So some of the similarities are coincidental or unintentional," he said. "I had no idea, for example, that he was initially assigned a female lawyer in New York." But there is one in the play.

While he does allow that Arar was his main inspiration, there were other sources, including a friend, filmmaker Bashar Shbib, "He was strip-searched three times in an airport in Las Vegas," Gow said. "And he packed up two homes in America and moved back to Canada within two weeks."

Has Arar reacted to Relative Good?

"No," he replied. "And when it was on in Ottawa, I guess at that time he (Arar) was living in Ottawa. I did hear from people who knew him. But they never spoke about his situation nor did they speak about the play in comparison to his situation."

Biography, autobiography and the documentary approach all have their place, Gow said. "But you can actually go further in the telling of a story through what I call a fictive lens. You're given freedom, licence. You don't have to spit on the facts or fly in the face of logic, but you are not concerned about a faithful reproduction of this man and his situation and his family, etc."

Relative Good is a political play, he said. "But structurally, it's a comedy. It's close to being a satire. If I were to place it somewhere within theatrical style, I would describe it as epic realism."

Striving for objectivity was not Gow's top priority. This is his personal take on what he considers to be a case of miscarried justice.

"I'm 43 years old and I was brought up in the era when the Canadian constitution was repatriated," he explained. "That was a big part of my youth." He believes in constitutions, written guarantees of rights. And he's concerned about the "sea change" in the status of human rights in North America since 9/11.

The fact that both of his parents were McGill-educated social workers (his father, Harry Gow, is a noted advocate of public transportation, founder of Transportation 2000) may have had something to do the development of his social conscience, too.

It certainly made for a nomadic childhood. Gow, who now lives in Montreal, was born in Cornwall, raised in Montreal, Ottawa and Russell, Ont. He studied theatre at Concordia University for a couple of years (he earned his MFA later, at York University), began his career as an actor, then made his playwriting debut at Centaur Theatre in 1996 with a play called The Friedman Family Fortune, starring Maurice Podbrey as the paterfamilias. But it was a later play, Cherry Docs (1998), about a Jewish civil rights lawyer who is forced to defend a racist skinhead, that went on to become an international hit. It was adapted into the film Steel Toes (2006), starring David Strathairn, who had performed in the U.S. première of Cherry Docs in Philadelphia. The film was co-directed by Gow and Mark Adam. Gow also wrote the screenplay and was a co-producer of the film, which won the Alex and Ruth Dworkin Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance at the Rendezvous du cinéma québécois in 2006.

Another Gow play, Bea's Niece, about a middle-age author who is confined to an asylum because she has lost her grip on reality, which premiered at 25th St. Theatre in Saskatoon, has also played south of the border as well as in Toronto.

For this production of Relative Good, Gow is back in the director's chair again, with his wife, writer/actor L. Kalo Gow, as assistant director.

Relative Good, written and directed by David Gow, previews Tuesday and Wednesday, opens Thursday and runs until March 30 at Centaur Theatre, 453 St. François Xavier St. in Old Montreal. Tickets: $20 (students) to $42.50. Call 514-288-3161 or www.centaurtheatre.com

pdonnell@thegazette.canwest.com