Unflinchingly human, unfulfilled humanity

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/04/2022 (1631 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Runner, the season-closing drama at the Tom Hendry Warehouse, grabs the audience’s senses before it even begins. A haze of theatrical smoke gives the room a post-disaster air and the stage is forebodingly shrouded in darkness.

When the lights go up, it’s to spotlight a solitary bearded man wearing a yarmulke and a fluorescent hazard vest, high above the floor. In the blackness, it takes a moment to realize the platform he’s on is a long treadmill; he slips out of the small pool of light as it moves him ever backward.

The man, Jacob (played by The Runner’s author, Toronto’s Christopher Morris), is a volunteer for ZAKA, the Orthodox Jewish first-responder organization (the full name is ZAKA, Identification, Extraction, Rescue — True Kindness) in Jerusalem. Its members rush to the scenes of terrorist attacks, bombings, disasters or accidents to provide first aid, but also to collect the viscera of Jewish bodies — every drop of blood, every scrap of skin — in order that they may be buried whole.

The “true kindness” element of the moniker refers to the fact that ensuring a proper burial for the dead is the ultimate mitzvah, a good deed for which it is impossible to be thanked by the recipient.

Jacob is disoriented, struggling to understand where he is. As he attempts to reconstruct events, walking slowly on the treadmill, he recalls a turning point, a mission where he chose to save the life of “an Arab girl,” as he calls her, rather than tending to the body of a dead Israeli soldier.

The girl, who had been shot in the back, may have killed the soldier, but Jacob followed his heart — and the Hippocratic oath — and put his efforts into helping the person he could save.

The fallout from this act — not one of kindness, but of simple humanity — finds Jacob questioning whether goodness is really an innate human quality, or if our tendencies toward tribalism and bigotry mean we’re truly barbarous at our cores.

As he attempts to answer that question, others are inevitably raised, and Jacob finds his own outlook shifting.

The one-man show, about 70 minutes without intermission, is undeniably gripping, but the dramatic, meticulous lighting by Bonnie Beecher, the frantic, unpredictable speed of the treadmill on Gillian Gallow’s set and Alexander MacSween’s minimal soundtrack — sharp stabs of strings — all effectively signal us to feel emotions that aren’t always borne out by the content.

The Runner is designed to make audiences think, but where it’s less successful is in making us feel. The issues it addresses — Islamophobia, antisemitism, Zionism, homophobia — are weighty and important, but presented with well-trodden truisms and two-sides-to-every-story balance. The stories Jacob recounts are both harrowing and thought-provoking, but while they feel freighted with import, they don’t connect in a personal way.

Where The Runner works best is not in the heightened moments of terror or horror (and be warned, these are often graphic and necessarily upsetting) but the quieter moments where Morris lets us see Jacob’s life, a sad, constrained existence with little real joy. The playwright/actor seamlessly slips into the skins of the secondary characters with subtle but distinct portrayals.

After the death of his father — movingly if briefly described — his family moved from London to Jerusalem, where his brother has embraced his birthright, living in a settlement within sight of Ramallah.

His mother, with whom Jacob lives, laments his lack of girlfriend and her subsequent lack of grandchildren; she’s blind to the fact that Jacob is never going to date any of the unsuitable women she finds for him. Their fraught relationship is nonetheless loving, and a moment when Jacob recalls rubbing her feet, swollen like cauliflowers, is very affecting.

The Runner’s momentum is compelling, but more of these small, intimate stories would make its heart beat more strongly.

jill.wilson@winnipegfreepress.com