As new Belfry Theatre season begins, cancellation of The Runner looms large | Canada Voices

As the Belfry Theatre prepares to open a new season of theatre in Victoria, Jewish audience members and artists in B.C.’s capital city are making sure the regional theatre’s decision to cancel a show set in Israel last season is not forgotten.

On Thursday night, members of a local synagogue’s theatre group will hold a private reading of The Runner, an award-winning Canadian play by Christopher Morris that the Belfry leadership pulled from its schedule in January amid heightened tensions in the Middle East.

Then, on Saturday, a smaller number from that same group plans to hold a public protest reading of the play outside of the Belfry at 7 p.m. as audience members file in to see its first show of the season, From Alaska.

“The point is for people who are going to go to the Belfry to see that this is not a dead issue in our minds,” says Ruth Schreier, a retired teacher who is co-organizing the public protest.

“There is, first of all, a concern about censorship,” says Francis Landy, a retired Religious Studies program professor who is holding the Thursday reading at a private residence, followed by a discussion facilitated (over videoconferencing) by stage director Tracey Erin Smith.

“Secondly, there is concern about anything Jewish or Israeli being boycotted. People like myself wondered: Will you be able to buy novels by Amos Oz and David Grossman or other Jewish writers in bookstores?”

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Both Landy and Schreier are members of a theatre club at Congregation Emanu-El running since 2019 when former Arts Club dramaturge Rachel Ditor moved from Vancouver to Victoria and joined the congregation. (Ditor is not involved in this week’s protest readings.)

Originally a theatre-going group that would attend productions at the Belfry and other local theatres, followed by discussions facilitated by Ditor, it pivoted into a play-reading group during the pandemic, gathering virtually to read Canadian scripts over Zoom.

Last year, the group had plans to attend The Runner – a 2018 solo show that concerns a volunteer with the Israeli emergency response organization ZAKA whose life is upended after his split-second decision to give medical attention to an Arab girl instead of an Israel Defense Forces soldier (and, until 2024, had been presented across the country without controversy).

But in January, the Belfry, which is run by artistic director Michael Shamata and executive director Isaac Thomas, decided to cancel its presentation of The Runner after being pressed to do so, first by an online petition that criticized its focus on Israeli perspectives and, again, at a heated in-person community meeting after which the theatre was spray-painted with the words “Free Palestine.” (The PuSh Festival in Vancouver soon followed suit.)

In a statement the Belfry released at the time, the regional theatre company gave as its reasons that “presenting The Runner at this particular time does not ensure the well-being of all segments of our community.”

“Given the current conflict in the Middle East, this is not the time for a play which may further tensions among our community,” the unsigned statement continued.

With a play once again cancelled, the Congregation Emanu-El group decided to resurrect their pandemic play-reading skills. On May 8 earlier this year, Schreier, Landy and about 16 others, some of whom were members of a local peace activist group, gathered to read the script two pages at a time at their synagogue.

The event cemented the feeling of those in attendance that The Runner had been unjustly cancelled. “I’m not sure that the people who protested again this play really read it,” says Schreier.

“I think they saw the word Israel and that was enough for them. There are members in the Jewish community who would be against this play also.”

Like Schreier, Landy would ultimately like to see the Belfry reprogram the show: “This was a superb play in my opinion about deeply topical issues and the theatre-going public in Victoria should have had a chance to see it and debate it.”

Among those participating in the May reading of The Runner was local playwright Mark Leiren-Young, who also attends Congregation Emanu-El. He’s not attending this week’s protests – but is responding to last season’s cancellation by artistic means.

Leiren-Young has been working for a number of years on a play for the well-known Canadian actor Saul Rubinek called Playing Shylock, which will have its world premiere at Canadian Stage in Toronto in October.

The metatheatrical play is about an actor playing Shylock in a fictional Canadian Stage production of The Merchant of Venice that gets cancelled because of controversy.

Playing Shylock originally borrowed language from a Metropolitan Opera statement issued when it cancelled a global broadcast of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer in 2014 – but Leiren-Young has now swapped that out for the language from the Belfry’s statement last year. Now the reason his show-within-a-show is cancelled is: “Given the current conflict in the Middle East, this is not the time for a play which may further tensions among our community.”

Back in the spring, Leiren-Young e-mailed the Belfry to ask how that nebulous statement might not equally apply to the uncancelled Belfry production of The Lehman Trilogy, a hit international play about the origins of Lehman Brothers that has been criticized in The Guardian for containing “antisemitic tropes.” He did not hear back.

“If I’d had a response to my letter, that might make me feel better about going back to the Belfry,” says the playwright, who, like Schreier and Landy is not currently attending shows there.

Shamata and Thomas did not respond to questions sent them by e-mail from The Globe and Mail this week about the planned protests. The Belfry’s leaders have not given any interviews since the cancellation of The Runner on the subject.