In 2016, a writer named Sarah Yahm published a piece in the Atlas Obscura online travel magazine about a fascinating place with a couch in Vermont and a bookshelf in Quebec: the Haskell Free Library and Opera House. Improbably, Haskell wrote, this unusual place “remains a transnational space that residents from both the U.S. and Canada can enter without a passport.”
Think a silent DMZ with books to lend.
How? Why? The border between the U.S. and Canada runs right down the middle of the library.
Perhaps the playwright and director Kareem Fahmy read Yahm’s piece as he penned “A Distinct Society,” the latest show at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. Certainly, the librarian at the core of the piece, has explanatory lines that are very close to what Yahm wrote: the library was born of a border quirk and of the determination of the residents of Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, to live as if their two communities were one town. All of that was fine for some 200 years, but after Sept 11, 2001, the U.S.-Canadian border became notably less casual and the library got more attention of the unwelcome kind. Especially as immigrant families with loved ones in both Canada and the United States used the library as a locus for easier reunions.
The Haskell Free Library is a great idea for a play. Frankly it could be an entire miniseries with recurring characters, like the librarian Manon (Kate Fry), the border guard Bruce (Amir Abdullah) and a local teenager Declan (Cole Keriazakos) who hangs out there due to having no other place really to go. Each episodes could draw from who arrives there and why.
But I digress. In essence, Fahmy has a terrific setting and concept for a great play, but not yet that play. As of now, the characters here feel not so much like complex humans but symbols for the authorial point of view, and thus the storytelling isn’t easy to believe.
Part of the problem is that some of the play is devoted to a romance between Manon, a quietly subversive librarian, as is usually true in theater, and Bruce, even though that makes for one unlikely couple (without much chemistry here). The problem is that Fahmy doesn’t want the audience to sympathize with an immigration official so he makes Bruce problematic, to say the least, even pulling out a gun at one point. It’s thus mighty tough to believe Manon would fall for him.
The other main story, which fights with the first, is that an Iranian doctor, Peyman (Rom Barkhordar) is using the library to meet up with his daughter Shirin (Aila Ayilam Peck), a sometime medical student. We’re led to believe that Shirin is impoverished to the point of having no food, but that’s not exactly reflected in Izumi Inaba’s elegant costume design, which reflects designer taste. That’s just one of the curious aspects of the show, not the least of which is how the teenager tells us he is the son of Irish immigrants who moved to Quebec as a small child and yet who speaks like a Toronto suburbanite, “a-boot” and all. Any Quebecois around Glencoe would wonder what is going on. I could keep going: Manon describes the layout of her library early in the play, a library we are looking at, courtesy of designer Paige Hathaway, and yet the words and the layout don’t match.
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You also have to swallow that there is only one border guard in this world and no other patrons in the library. Some of that is a reasonable ask of an audience, but the play has no clear temporal referent. We don’t know what moment this is in America’s fraught border history and, given that the play is otherwise entirely rooted in realism, that further perplexes.
To put all this more simply: the script, which is too long for a one-act, needs a lot of work and, although there are some strong actors in the piece and some potent moments, it generally behooves new writers not to direct their own promising works in progress. Better to step back, stand on both sides of the border and decide whose story you really want to tell.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “A Distinct Society” (2.5 stars)
When: Through July 23
Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Tickets: $35-$90 at 847-242-6000 and www.writerstheatre.com