This summer, the immigration crisis in Europe is claiming more attention and stirs more anguish than ISIS does. Tens of thousands of refugees fleeing war and impoverishment in Syria, Libya, Iraq and sub-Saharan Africa are making dangerous crossings of the Mediterranean to reach Europe – and Europe doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea what to do about it.
Although Thaddeus Phillips is fortunate enough to be born in the U.S., his ingenious monologue – “17 Border Crossings”— touches on the plight of refugees as well as backpacking itinerants from the West. He begins with an obscure passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V which contains one of the earliest references to passports in the Western canon:
“Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart. His passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.”
Phillips’ narrative jumps back and forth between trips he made in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America in the 1990s and early 2000s. Possibly the riskiest of the 17 border crossings he describes was a journey he took by train from the Prague to Belgrade in the midst of the Balkan war. Serb border agents couldn’t understand why someone from the U.S., a country then at war with Serbia, would want to come to Belgrade. At a Colombian border, an official accused him of being a Taliban after spotting a Moroccan stamp in his passport. As he recites these anecdotes, Phillips alternates roles, playing not only the naive American but the officious border agents he confronts, switching fluidly – and fluently — from Serbo-Croatian to Spanish to Arabic. In at least one case, he crossed a border – between Argentina and Brazil –where there was no demarcation of the border at all and the danger he faced didn’t come from suspicious customs officials but from a pack of snarling dogs. Phillips weaves into his tale the stories of two desperate migrants without passports. In one case, he tells of an Angolan who secreted himself in the wheel well of a London-bound flight right before its departure from Luanda. He ended up falling from the sky over the English countryside. In another case, Phillips relates his meeting with a Mexican in Ciudad Juarez who was resolved to sneak into the U.S. in spite of having been caught several times before. Phillips imagines a happier ending for him.
There are now about sixty million refugees moving from one part of the world to another, more than at any time since World War II, all looking for the same things: employment and safety. For them, border crossings can be a matter of life and death, not just an adventure undertaken with a Lonely Planet guide in hand.
But even globetrotting by the well-heeled comes with its own drawbacks, as writer and performer Daniel Baye reminds us in his solo show “Going Viral.” The title doesn’t refer to a YouTube sensation, but rather to…well, viruses. One reviewer described “Going Viral” as a “probing mash-up of documentary theatre and politically charged speculative fiction,” an apt enough description. Baye makes for a genial master of ceremonies, especially given the nature of the subject matter. He begins by telling his audience about an international flight he took recently. Well, he didn’t take it. He imagined it. But the scenario he constructs is as plausible as it is chilling, the more so with memories of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa so fresh in people’s minds. As we all know, viruses like to travel – that’s how they survive, after all – and people tend to help them (unwittingly, to be sure) by giving them a lift. Baye puts himself in the role of an ordinary passenger returning to London from a visit to Africa. He’s sitting next to an attractive woman. She’s crying. He asks her what’s wrong, but she refuses to answer – and for good reason: she doesn’t know herself. But she can’t stop crying. Shortly after the plane lands, every passenger on board succumbs to uncontrollable fits of weeping – except for the narrator. These crying jags turn out to be symptomatic of a rampaging viral infection that is soon spreading around the world. As fatalities mount, governments impose draconian quarantines in a futile effort to contain the pandemic and keep panic at bay. People are afraid to hug one another for fear of catching this virus. (Even after the Ebola outbreak was over, Liberians still greeted one another by bumping elbows rather than taking the risk of shaking hands.) Baye uses few props – a couple of hand sanitizers and liquorice allsorts (colored English candies) to represent viral particles. He throws in a few lessons about viruses along the way, pointing out that most viruses don’t do us any harm – in fact, viral fragments make up about 8 percent of our DNA – and that just because a virus like Ebola might be very dangerous doesn’t mean that it’s the most infectious, an honor (if that’s the word) that goes to measles.
A different kind of lethal agent figures in the “Litvinenko Project,” staged by Tom Barnes and Matt Wilks for the 2 Magpies Theatre, which specializes in offbeat fare.
For those of you who might not have been keeping up with Kremlin conspiracies, Alexander Litvinenko was a high-ranking officer in the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, when he defected and sought refuge in London in 2000. Six years later, he was assassinated, probably by Russian operatives acting on Kremlin orders. What made the mysterious murder stand out was the unusual method used to kill him – poisoning by polonium 210, a deadly radioactive isotope. The British investigation proceeded in fits and starts; only this year did the Royal Courts of Justice conclude its inquiry in spite of the absence of cooperation from the Russian government.
Barnes and Wilks were both so intrigued by the case – which could have been written by John le Carré in collaboration with Agatha Christie — that they decided to stage a short play about it. “We want to add to the discourse and keep it in the public consciousness,” Wilks explained, “It is a really interesting, sensitive story and we are coming to it from the point of view of contemporary theatre.” “The Litvinenko Project” is performed in a café; audience members are served a pot of tea for reasons that will become clear as the story unfolds.
In the play the two actors – playing all the roles — reenact the day that Litvinenko was poisoned. It skims along the surface of events rather than exploring character or motivation. This happened, then that happened. Litvinenko has breakfast with his wife Marina. He meets a shady Italian named Mario Scaramella at a sushi bar. Scaramella variously claims to be an investigator, a professor and a businessman. (He’s now in prison in Italy on charges unrelated to this case.) At lunch he warns Litvinenko to take care, advising him that he’s on a Kremlin hit list. But what was his motive? And why when Litvinenko ate sushi, did the Italian eat nothing? Later that afternoon, Litvinenko meets with three Russians, all former security agents, at the bar of the Millennium Hotel, supposedly to talk about a commodities deal. He didn’t have anything stronger to drink than tea. Maybe he should have opted for a martini. Investigators believe that it was the tea that killed him.
The two actors relate these events in an antic spirit, jumping from incident to incident like excited kids, at one point donning Hazmat suits and masks to portray the British pathologists who struggled to figure out what was wrong with the dying man. Polonium, after all, isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of poison. Iit’s possible that if Litvinenko hadn’t hung on for nearly three weeks after receiving the fatal dose, the true cause might never have been identified. Realizing he had little time left, Litvinenko dictated a deathbed statement, naming Russian President Vladimir Putin as his murderer.
The victim’s widow pronounced herself pleased with the results of the Royal Court’s inquiry. “I believe that the truth has finally been uncovered. The murderers and their paymasters have been unmasked.”
Unmasked maybe, but not apprehended: the two principal suspects — Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitri – both of whom had met Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel, are back in Moscow (Kotvin is a member of the Duma, Russian’s parliament) and refused to give testimony to the Royal Courts. The Kremlin denounced the inquiry as a rush to judgment.
“The Litvinenko Project” doesn’t provide an entirely satisfying resolution. On the other hand, in this case, neither does real life.
