Theatre review: The Frontliners' trio finds urgent nuance in the stress and grind of crisis

Zahida Rahemtulla’s new play reflects three versions of what it meant to hold things together during the 2016 refugee resettlement initiative

By Angie Rico

(Left to right) Adrian Neblett, Janavi Chawla, and Francis Dowlatabadi in The Frontliners. Photo by Sarah Race

Blackout Art Society, the Firehall Arts Centre, and Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre present The Frontliners at the Firehall Theatre to May 11

OUR RELATIONSHIP TO THE word frontliner shifts depending on what we’re collectively moving through. Zahida Rahemtulla’s The Frontliners calls back to a moment in recent Canadian memory when one definition of being on the frontlines meant sorting through paperwork, fielding calls, and trying to settle families in a city already deep in a housing crisis.

The play, on at the Firehall Arts Centre, takes us back to Canada’s 2016 resettlement initiative, when thousands of Syrian refugees were arriving. It follows three staff members at a newcomer office in Vancouver as they scramble to place 27 families who are temporarily staying in a hotel that grows more crowded and stretched by the day.

Rahemtulla gives us three very different versions of what it means to show up every day and try to hold things together. There’s the supervisor Yusuf, who’s worked the same job for over 30 years, never promoted or moved into main office, not because he’s unambitious, but because he’s become indispensable. He knows how to play the game, when to smooth things over and when to push back. Nadia is new, bringing in a lot of eagerness to be helpful, but also inexperience that sometimes gets in the way and more often causes her to butt heads with Omar, the other new temp who only recently got to Canada himself.

Omar’s family is still in Damascus, and he checks in constantly. He is the closest to what’s going on, which puts him in the role of translator for the press, liaison for community do-gooders who want to help but sometimes create obstacles. He gives out his personal number to families when he shouldn’t, and gets invited over for mujadara by some of them because he’s been through something of the same, or close to it.

He also doesn’t get along with every Syrian family on their list. Not everyone shares the political beliefs he put his life on the line for back home (which, as he puts it, was its own way of being on the frontlines). We get to know Omar gradually, and that slow reveal gives the play its strongest emotional thread. His supervisor calls him a young revolutionary—affectionately, but with the kind of weariness that comes from having once been in his position. And Omar really has been through it. “People [like us] are meant to live many lives in their lifetime,” he tells Yusuf, “other people just get to live the one.” Francis Dowlatabadi plays him with urgency. There’s a charge to the way he moves through scenes: sometimes open and candid, other times restless and a little out of reach. Dowlatabadi doesn’t try to smooth the edges and keeps the tension the point.

The other two performances meet him in that space. Janavi Chawla’s Nadia starts the show in a scramble; trying hard, moving fast, sometimes missing the mark. Chawla lets that effort sit earnestly. As the play goes on, Nadia doesn’t slow down, but she starts to listen more (and stand up for herself more, when necessary). Chawla makes that shift feel well-earned.

Adrian Neblett’s Yusuf is warm and caring, but also pragmatic and slightly jaded. He runs the office in a way that helps keep the show grounded under Neblett’s easy charm and believably soft authority. Neblett also has a light touch with the play’s humour and the best comic timing out of the trio, which is helpful, as his character is armed with a lot of quips.

Derek Chan’s direction keeps things moving, even though the action stays inside the office and the conversations within it. Phones ring, forms get passed around, buzzers go off, CBC Radio announcements place us in time. Parjad Sharifi’s set helps with the flow too: an overstuffed office where the trio is always coming and going, stepping over a pile of donations in the middle of the room that never stops growing—even though they’ve stopped accepting them. There’s a rhythm to it that mirrors the grind of the work. Lighting shifts mark the (stressful) passing of time, and a fast-paced montage about midway through gives things a bit of a welcome jolt.

The sound design adds a subtle pulse, with original music by Farouk Alsajee and Ruby Singh. Alsajee’s oud comes in just now and then, not to guide the mood, exactly, but to leave a sense of cultural specificity and distance, or memory.  

The show does stretch at times. It runs just over two hours, and you start to feel it. Maybe that has to do with the nuance: it’s what slows the pace, but it’s also what gives the play its weight. And the world of the play holds. You want to stay with these characters, and with how their idea of a frontliner brushes up against our own.

The Frontliners’ Adrian Neblett. Photo by Sarah Race

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