After a few moments of total darkness, the lights snap on: a man sits centre stage, facing a video camera. There’s a white chair, and a black backdrop onto which his image is projected live. Within this deliberately austere setting, playwright and lead performer Ahmad Meree asks whether becoming a citizen is enough to cease being a stranger in the country you call home.
Uncivilized is a co-production between Theatre Passe Muraille and 7Spices Theatre, a Toronto collective supporting Arab artists and those from Southwest Asia and North Africa. As Meree explained after the curtain call at the performance I attended, the play draws on his journey from being a Syrian refugee to a Canadian citizen. Personal history unfolds into a larger argument about belonging — and who gets to draw its boundaries.
The play continues with what appears to be an immigration interview. “Name?” asks an unseen voice. Finally eligible for Canadian citizenship, the protagonist dutifully recites his full name, which carries generations of family history in the Arabic tradition. The interviewer’s impeccable Canadian English yields only a mangled “Mohammad.” This seemingly simple exchange sets the terms: he has barely introduced himself before his interrogator edits him down to size.
Although Meree is the only actor on stage, Uncivilized is no solo show. His unseen interviewer (Shannon Pitre) becomes a full-fledged participant in the action. Before long, the conversation turns to the very notion of being “civilized” — and its power to separate insiders from outsiders.
To probe this sensitive territory, director Radwan Taleb lets documentary reality into the conversation: news clips projected onto the backdrop (projection design is by Nicole Eun-Ju Bell) show coverage of refugees, including those fleeing the war in Ukraine. Journalists describe them as coming from “relatively civilized, relatively European” places, in contrast to the Middle East, or as “Christians, white, civilized.” The same divide plays out in an imagined talk show, with Meree assuming the host’s chair as Jonathan White — white, Christian and, by this logic, impeccably “civilized.”
Documentary evidence and theatrical invention provide fertile ground for vivid tragicomic sketches. If Mohammad is a brown-skinned Muslim from Syria rather than a blue-eyed white European, does that make him “uncivilized”? And if he lightens his skin with powder, dons a classic Canadian lumberjack shirt, and adds a cross for good measure, will his interrogator deem him civilized, and therefore worthy of citizenship? Perhaps Canadian-flag underwear will prove that he could hardly wear his Canadian identity any closer to the skin?
Meree performs these sketches with a stand-up comic’s energy and confidence, relishing the audience’s response. Beneath the comedy, assimilation emerges as an exhausting performance of constantly working to meet others’ expectations. The house erupts in laughter as Meree finds comedy where bureaucratic solemnity reigns — in official rituals, questions on forms, and the need to prove yourself worthy of belonging.
The unseen interrogator, meanwhile, has an agenda of their own. Pitre gives impersonal authority a palpable presence through voice alone — its inflections, pauses, and pointedly precise, standard English pronunciation. Midway through, the play lurches from comedy into drama as Mohammad tries to locate the source of that voice. Who or what is speaking to him? Is there a person behind it at all, or merely a state machine that has learned to mimic human speech?
In the second half, Mohammad is a Canadian citizen. Once needing a visa “literally to go to the washroom,” he now enjoys an open world and the other privileges of a Canadian passport. But the Voice persists, demanding gratitude: thousands would love to be in his place.
The play brings theatrical ingenuity to questions that resist easy answers. As those questions multiply, however, its dramatic direction grows less clear: some episodes return to the injustice of rules whose unfairness has already been convincingly established. The frequent shifts in register don’t always help, with transitions from stand-up to drama sometimes dissipating the tension and disrupting the production’s emotional rhythm.
Yet the play’s most persuasive argument is Meree himself: his verve, vulnerability, and gift for making instant accomplices of the audience. The belonging his character must prove in front of a camera embodying bureaucracy emerges naturally in his connection with an audience of living, breathing people. In this encounter, belonging becomes something to be shared rather than proven.
Uncivilized runs at Theatre Passe Muraille until October 24. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Natalia Mukhina
Natalia Mukhina is a Toronto-based freelance arts and culture writer with a PhD in social sciences from Queen’s University and a degree in literary studies. A longtime theatre-goer, she has attended productions around the world. Her literary background feeds her interest in how stories travel from page to stage and screen — and what they become along the way.
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