The Toronto Theatre Review: The Surrogate at Crow’s Theatre
By Ross
The first voices we hear in Mohsin Zaidi’s The Surrogate don’t come from the hospital room at all, but from the other end of a phone line. Sameer’s mother calls repeatedly throughout the night, her conflictual concern for her son threaded with the quiet tensions of culture, family obligation, and a strain of homophobia that never quite disappears. At one point, Sameer describes living as if two different songs are playing at the same time, an image that neatly captures the emotional contradictions the play refuses to simplify. This sharpness makes Zaidi’s gripping drama a riveting and electrifying collision of opposing forces. The Here For Now Theatre production, in association with Crow’s Theatre, House + Body, and b current Performing Arts, wisely unfolds the debate over a single sleepless night in a New Orleans hospital, where a queer couple anxiously waits after the woman carrying their child is admitted with serious complications.
What initially feels like the setup for a contained medical crisis gradually unfolds into something far more expansive: a searching, often uncomfortable debate about surrogacy, privilege, bodily autonomy, and who ultimately has the right to decide what a family becomes and whose needs rise to the top. Zaidi’s play is most compelling when it lets that debate rage freely. The drama, as directed with focus by Christopher Manousos (H+B’s Measure For Measure), largely unfolds outside the hospital room, where Jake and Sameer confront hospital policy, an opinionated nurse, and, eventually, Marya’s son, each bringing their own perspective to the already fraught situation. Arguments shift constantly, alliances fracture, and no one emerges as entirely heroic.
The writing resists easy answers, allowing each character to be flawed, passionate, and occasionally outright frustrating. That complexity is part of the play’s strength, keeping the questions at its centre genuinely unsettled. At times, the dialogue leans toward heightened metaphor, language that feels more theatrical than conversational, but the emotional charge behind it usually keeps the arguments alive and vivid. The play is also acutely aware of how language itself shapes that debate. Moments after first meeting, the nurse bluntly tells Sameer, “You can say vagina,” refusing his euphemisms, only for Sameer to fire back moments later, “You can say husband,” when she minimizes his relationship to Jake. Even Marya herself becomes a shifting term within the argument; sometimes “the surrogate,” sometimes “the mother,” depending on which legal or emotional framework the speaker wants to claim.
At the heart of it all are Fuad Ahmed (CanStage/RMTC’s New) and Thom Nyhuus (Scrap Paper’s Cannibal) as Sameer and Jake, two men who have invested years of emotional and financial hope in the child they are waiting for. Ahmed plays Sameer with a sharp, defensive edge that makes his desperation difficult to like but impossible to ignore. Nyhuus gives Jake a softer, far more earnest stance that complicates their partnership in fascinating ways, making us question their longevity even before The Surrogate does. The handsome Sameer is both compelling and deeply aggravating, a man whose impulses make him difficult to like but impossible to dismiss. The softer Jake, by contrast, seems almost willfully oblivious and naïve to the homophobia that could shape their situation, repeatedly assuming warmth and acceptance even when the nurse’s tone suggests otherwise.
Around them swirl a series of strong performances, particularly Antonette Rudder (Stratford’s Romeo and Juliet) as a no-nonsense nurse unafraid to challenge their assumptions. Siddharth Sharma (Crave’s “Late Bloomer“) arrives midway through the night as Marya’s son Qasim, carrying his own complicated stake in the outcome. One extended moment finds him speaking tenderly to his unconscious mother, a scene clearly intended to break the audience’s heart. Yet the writing here leans so heavily on metaphor that the speech begins to feel less like the voice of an overwhelmed eighteen-year-old and more like the playwright stepping in. It was the only moment in the evening when the play briefly lost its emotional grip, a rare instance in which the language felt more performed than lived. And then there is Sarena Parmar (Shaw’s Dancing at Lughnasa) as Marya herself, whose presence, sometimes silent, sometimes startlingly decisive, haunts the entire space with chaotic, nervous energy.
Yet for all its thematic urgency, the production’s staging occasionally works against its own emotional centre. Scott Penner’s striking design places Marya’s hospital bed beneath reflective overhead panels that mirror her presence back to the audience. It’s a beautiful and conceptually rich image that constantly reminds us who and what this debate truly revolves around. The harsh overhead lighting, designed by Chris Malkowski (Shaw’s Blues for an Alabama Sky), pulses across the length of the space, sometimes echoing the terrifying rhythm of Marya’s seizures while guiding our eyes toward the centre of the action. The sound by Maddie Bautista (Grand’s Pride & Prejudice) and costume design by Andrew Broderick (Crow’s Octet) work with equal clarity, grounding the production in a world that feels both clinical and emotionally volatile.
But positioning the bed far upstage at the end of a long runway-like playing area reduces that central image, placing a literal, neck-straining distance from the arguments unfolding around it. Director Manousos also occasionally places actors among the audience, subtly collapsing the distance between stage and spectator and making the intimate Studio Theatre feel less like a performance space and more like the waiting room where these anxious conversations unfold. The play’s intellectual energy lives in the hallway conversations, yet its emotional core remains just out of reach, forcing the audience to periodically recalibrate where the play’s true centre of gravity lies.
The power of The Surrogate, now playing at Crow’s Theatre, ultimately comes from its willingness to wrestle openly with issues that theatre rarely examines with such candor. Like Sameer’s description of living between two songs playing at once, Zaidi’s script refuses to resolve its contradictions neatly, nor does it simplify the messy intersection of money, desire, autonomy, and love that defines modern surrogacy. The play confronts the complex realities of homophobia and queer family-making. Instead, it wisely allows the debate to remain unresolved. In a world where the rules of family-making are still being written, The Surrogate becomes a charged hospital hallway where debate is fevered and the outcome uncertain, leaving us waiting with bated breath for a resolution that may never come.
