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The murder of a wealthy landowner leads to the arrest of his eldest son. A grieving widow matches wits with her late husband’s aggressive creditor. Family loyalties are severely tested over the fate of a beloved summer home. Factory workers kill a hated boss and connive to hide the killer.

The Brothers Karamazov captures the spirit, scope and dark humour of the Dostoevsky novel. Gorky’s unknown gem Enemies and Chekhov’s bright farce The Bear are given vibrant, contemporary language. Joining these three adaptations is an entirely new play, After the Orchard, inspired by Chekhov’s last play and placed in contemporary Ontario cottage country. No matter the setting, Russian never sounded so good.

Includes:
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, from the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Constance Garnett translation)
THE BEAR, a new version of the vaudeville by Anton Chekhov
ENEMIES, an adaptation of the play by Maxim Gorky
AFTER THE ORCHARD, a new play inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard

A group of almost-over-the-hill urban Egyptian hipsters gathers every night on a Cairo houseboat where they smoke weed, gab on their cell phones, and rag on everything they think is messing up their lives. Led by their master of ceremonies, a near catatonic petty bureaucrat named Anis, they get baked and try to forget that secularists like them are being shunted to the sidelines in the wave of alleged “fundamentalist” Islamic politics sweeping Egypt and much of the Arab world.

When Samara, a young Islamic journalist joins the group, however, Anis’s spell is broken. From the moment he sees this hijab-clad woman, he starts to remember the ugly journey that brought him to his almost total detachment from the harsh realities of the outside world. Threatened by this incursion into their long-established sanctuary, his buddies try to drive Samara away. But Anis resists. He has fallen in love. Unfortunately for him, however, this seemingly devout journalist also has a couple of secrets of her own.

While Adrift begins as a stoners’ drawing-room comedy, it ends in random, chaotic tragedy—by the end of the play the Nile River houseboat feels like it’s been transplanted to flood-ravaged New Orleans. It is a play about the tragedy of the innocents caught between the Holy Wars of our twenty-first century.

Inspired by the novel Adrift on the Nile by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Adrift is set against the backdrop of the US war on Iraq and a region burdened by the gorgon-head legacies of colonialism, corruption and violent dictatorship. It is about a group of people at the epicentre of conflict between the West’s ever-accelerating and utterly ahistorical imperial culture, and its doppelgänger: the tide of religious fundamentalism that is growing ever more powerful in its wake.

Cast of 4 women and 6 men.

In this elaborate agitprop theatrical collaboration, the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the “war on terror” are exposed as the propaganda vehicles for the neo-colonialism of the West that they are. “Ali Hakim” and “Ali Ababwa,” refugees from the imaginary country “Agraba,” attempt to seduce their audience into providing them with food, refuge, security, freedom and the material benefits of Western consumer society, failing miserably at every step. A hard-hitting presentation of a play-within-a-play assaults the audience as Youssef, Verdecchia and Chai do Shakespeare, Shaw and Swift one better with an endless string of buffooneries and absurdities derived from an inversion of the clichés defining the geo-politics of the Middle East at the beginning of the 21st century.

Informed by the research of Paul Krugman and Noam Chomsky, sent up by the post-modern cultural relativism of “Jean Paul Jacques Beauderrièredada,” this political satire is not for the faint of heart.

Cast of 4 men.