Theatre review: Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story is dark yet intensely entertaining
Multi-threat performer Ben Caplan thunders in the music-theatre piece based on the true story of playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s great grandparents
Ben Caplan in Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story. Photo by Stoo Metz Photography
SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs presents Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts to December 11
THERE’S LITTLE ROMANCE and much bleakness in Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story. Yet in the hands—and voices and multiple instruments—of the mightily capable cast members, most notably wild man Ben Caplan, the tale is intensely entertaining.
The play takes its subtitle from former Canadian Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s 2015 use of the term “old stock Canadians” in response to a question on support for reduced health coverage for refugees. The genre-mashing piece has, unfortunately, only deepened in resonance due to world events since its 2017 debut.
Caplan co-created the music-theatre hybrid with director Christian Barry and playwright Hannah Moscovitch of Halifax’s 2b theatre company. Moscovitch based the script on the true story of her great grandparents, Chaim and Chaya. The two Jewish refugees fled Romania separately in 1908, a time when anti-Semitism was widespread and strong (and even openly accepted by their home country’s political parties). They met at an immigrant processing centre in Halifax and wound up living in Montreal.
Chaim (Eric Da Costa) is hopeful and forward-looking; Chaya (Shaina Silver-Baird) is tight-lipped and stern. Through the narration of Caplan’s Wanderer, we learn that Chaim’s entire family was slaughtered in a pogrom (the word resembling Yiddish and Russian terms that mean “devastation”), mass attacks on Jews that saw Russian mobs burning their homes and synagogues, murdering thousands and leaving countless others to flee. (The Holocaust is sometimes called “the last pogrom”.) Chaya lost her beloved husband and baby on their attempt to reach safety, trekking out of Romania, hungry and sick.
“Narrate” doesn’t accurately depict the way Caplan reveals the extraordinarily difficult details of the couple’s existence. A cross between a shaman, southern preacher, and ringmaster, with spectacles and big, bushy beard, he positively thunders. A magnetic and commanding presence, he winks and grins and, when not animatedly telling stories, breaks into song, the score a mix of folk, klezmer, rock, and lullaby. Dressed in a burgundy top hat and open coat with a feathery boutonniere to match, he can push his booming baritone up multiple octaves, sometimes solo, with or without banjo, guitar, or harmonica; at other times accompanied by Da Costa (clarinet, flute, spoons), Silver-Baird (violin), and band members Jacques Arsenault (keyboard, accordion) and Andrew Wiseman (percussion, washboard).
The musicians are all fantastic, while one of Old Stock’s most powerful moments is a spare solo number in which Caplan, donning a fringed shall, sings a Yiddish prayer. It’s beautiful, coming when Chaim and Chaya’s infant son is gravely ill. The boy recovers from his fever, and from there, the play gallops through the family’s history, right up to the pair’s 14 great great-grandchildren.
Throughout Old Stock, the songs (written mostly by Caplan and Barry) explode with rage and point to life’s absurdities and ironies, touching on topics such as adultery, justice, sorrow, regret, religion, hypocrisy, and identity. One section features an extended list of euphemisms for sex (“gland to gland combat”, “rummaging in the root cellar”, “shampooing the rookie”); in terms of comedy, it’s limp.
At different points, Caplan brings to mind Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave. His powerhouse performance alone is reason to pick up tickets.
Like the show itself, the set, designed by Barry and Louisa Adamson, packs a lot in. A train car opens up to reveal the band members positioned amid hanging scarves and cloths, big suitcases, an elaborate tea pot.
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