“Children Acting the ‘Play Scene’ from ‘Hamlet,’ Act II, Scene ii,” circa 1863, by Charles Hunt. Public Domain
Commentary
A couple of years ago, Vancouver’s PuSh Festival cancelled its planned production of Christopher Morris’s “The Runner.” The issue was not that the play had suddenly become unwatchable; its repeated performances had earned lavish praise. The issue suddenly was that Morris, a Canadian playwright, had “no religious or cultural ties to the region” he was portraying—Israel. So PuSh chose instead to “honour the artist whose work reflects their lived experience” by producing Palestinian-Syrian Basel Zaraa’s “Dear Laila,” whose perspective it described as “grossly underrepresented in Canadian theatre and performance culture.”
