Real lives, historical truths, and a bit of magic realism fuel Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story
The hit musical’s story of survival and progress still speaks poignantly to displacement and migration in Canada today
Ben Caplan is part carnival barker, part cantor, part shaman, and part omniscient narrator.
SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs presents Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts from December 1 to 11.
AN IMPROMPTU SURVEY of arts professionals indicates that few, if any, have much respect for former prime minister Stephen Harper, and it’s likely that’s an opinion shared by the three principals behind 2b theatre company’s well-received musical Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story.
Songwriter Ben Caplan, playwright Hannah Moscovich, and director Christian Barry admit, however, that they are somewhat indebted to the former Conservative leader, whose dogwhistle politics provided their show’s title, along with the impetus to tell an immigrant story that serves as an upbeat riposte to the xenophobic forces that Harper has enabled.
“It all started with Christian Barry getting in touch with me and asking if I wanted to work on a show with him, and we were in the early, early development stage of imagining what a show could be when we started to tilt into conversations around migration and refugees,” Caplan explains, checking in by cellphone while en route to Toronto, where Old Stock will run before coming to SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts beginning December 1. “And then we were coloured by Mr. Harper’s remarks about ‘old stock Canadians’ during the 2015 Conservative Party leadership debate. He made this distinction between, you know, new arrivals and old-stock Canadians. That got us thinking about ways, perhaps, that we could use a Jewish story, using my background and heritage as a lens through which to think about the contemporary refugee crisis.”
Then serendipity struck. “It was while we were in that phase of things that Hannah—who happens to be Christian’s partner, and also the mother of his child, and also Jewish—found the records of her great-grandparents coming into Canada,” Caplan explains. “She saw that Chaya had arrived with her whole family and Chaim had arrived alone, passing through [Halifax immigration portal] Pier 21, or Pier 2, as it was called then. Which was the very ground that she was standing on when she found the records, so it was this resonant moment where she and her child, just recently born, wouldn’t have existed had it not been for this journey that Chaim and Chaya had made 115 years ago.”
With that powerful family connection, its relevance to ongoing crises of displacement, and a cast of musically adept actors, the three Nova Scotia artists began to frame a story that centres around 1908, but reaches back into ancient Eastern European tragedies and forward into our increasingly uncertain present. “The action of the show tends to shift back and forth between a current, contemporary address with the audience, and then telling the story,” Caplan says. “It’s quite intentionally done, this interruption of ‘1908’ to speak across the fourth wall with the audience now.
“When we wrote the show in 2015, the rise in antisemitism wasn’t really what was on our minds,” he continues. “What was on our minds was the dehumanization of people engaged in any struggle. We were talking about refugees coming to Canada… So many of the conversations devolved into numbers and quotas and ‘waves of migration’ and ‘hordes of people’. And what gets lost in that is the individuals that are actually engaged in these dramas, the individuality of the hopes and the dreams and the private lives of the people that are engaged in these terrible situations. So I think Old Stock’s goal is really to universalize the specific, in thinking about the fact that there are real lives involved behind any of these situations.”
Real lives and historical truths have certainly helped shape Old Stock, but there’s a strong element of fantasy to it as well, and while the script has political intent, it mostly stays well away from hectoring mode. At times, too, it’s just stunningly beautiful, most strikingly when Caplan, playing a multifaceted character named the Wanderer, dons a prayer shawl and, in song, implores Yahweh to spare the life of Chaim and Chaya’s ailing baby.
It works, and so Old Stock is in many ways a happy story of survival and progress, with a cautionary sting that comes through the remembrance of all those who died in pogroms and forced marches and the Holocaust. And although Chaim and Chaya—played here by Eric Da Costa and Shaina Silver-Baird—are its central figures, there’s little question that Caplan steals the show. His Wanderer—part carnival barker, part cantor, part shaman, and part omniscient narrator—provides the magic in this production’s magic realism; he’s like an Isaac Bashevis Singer character reimagined by Bertolt Brecht.
“I think of him as somebody who is larger than life and has this carnivalesque quality to him, but who’s also very sensitive, and feels the weight of the story deeply,” Caplan notes. “His way of coping with the darkness of the story that he tells is through the humour and the lightness and the exuberance that he brings to the telling.”
Typifying that, he adds, is his decision to upend the antisemitic trope of the Wandering Jew by a wryly realistic response to the forces that have compelled his wanderings. “I’m wandering in the sense that I’m moving around from town to town telling this story, and that’s sort of built into the character, built into the show. But the opening line of the show—the opening lyric, the opening text—is ‘I have been libelled as a wanderer. This is not the case. I have a home, it’s just that it’s… an inconvenient place right now.’ And so that sort of tongue-in-cheek opening, for me, helps to ground the explanation of what the Wanderer is.”
Chaim, Chaya, and the Wanderer, like all refugees, have literally had the ground pulled out from under their feet, and there are points in Old Stock when viewers might feel a similar sense of disorientation. That, too, is part of the plan.
“It’s important for me, as an art-maker, to invest in the audience, to invest a certain amount of trust and to ask something of the audience,” says Caplan. “I think it’s important that a piece of art that is going to be deep needs to have space for the audience to reach towards it. If you give everything to the audience, if you put everything on a silver platter, I think that it takes the joy out of interpreting the work, or experiencing the work.
“And so I think that by telling a story about two refugees and then dropping in lines about ‘barbaric cultural practices’ and these other little references that we throw in….we hope that by hearing these quotes, hearing some of these dog whistles that we’ve experienced in Canadian political discourse, we open up the opportunity for the audience to hear those things in a slightly different way.”
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