Vilification of refugees seeking asylum has become such an insidious staple of our political discourse that just the fact that a new play focuses on an asylum interview might make theatergoers brace themselves for a difficult and perhaps infuriating experience.
Playing at Shotgun Players’ Ashby Stage, Tim Cowbury’s play “The Claim” is a U.K. import rather than an American story, but it raises a lot of familiar frustrations about the stereotypical assumptions people make about immigrants, and refugees in particular. It’s also very funny in the nonstop misunderstandings its characters make, even though the stakes are so high.
“The idea of an asylum interview is to tell a story that’s so compelling that you earn asylum,” says director Rebecca Novick. “And what happens in the play’s sort of through-the-looking-glass version of an asylum interview is that by attempting to make sense of the story, they end up making nonsense of the story, and they get it completely wrong. And it’s because they’re trying to make the story make a kind of sense that’s predictable to them, that fits into a box, that makes the character seeking asylum into the sort of hero or villain they want him to be.”
“The reality,” she adds, “is that people’s stories are complicated and contradictory and not easily categorized.”
Our immigration system does not typically appear to be concerned with that kind of nuance, to put it mildly.
“I mean, just a week ago our country was running down asylum seekers on horseback,” says actor Kenny Scott. “These are the things that are happening every single day in our country, and in most other countries abroad. There are people who are just looking for a better life, and we have the power to give that to them, but we are always bogged down by our own preconceived notions of who they are, who they should be. We’re always challenged by our own biases. And this play really speaks to that.”
Scott plays Serge, a hopeful Congolese refugee undergoing questioning about his application for asylum by Soren Santos and Radhika Rao as A and B, a pair of British bureaucrats whose attempts to elicit his story only succeed in misinterpreting it beyond all recognition.
“It’s a very funny, very energetic, very deeply sad play that is always moving,” Scott says. “There’s a fast pace. As you watch it, you might become more aware of your own biases. It’s a play that can be hard for some people to watch. But it’s full of heart and love and energy, and I am very excited for people to see it.”
A hit at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where Shotgun artistic director Patrick Dooley saw it while on a sabbatical, “The Claim” now becomes Shotgun Players’ first live, in-person production since “Vinegar Tom” closed in January 2020. There will also be two live-streamed performances on October 21 and 28.
“The Claim” was originally supposed to open in May 2020, until the pandemic put the kibosh on live performance all over for a year and a half starting last March (when Shotgun was in rehearsals for “Henry V”). In the meantime the company released an audio workshop production of “The Claim” online last summer.
Sadly, over all that time the subject matter hasn’t become any less timely.
“Each time we’ve been doing this play it’s been a particularly good time to be doing this play,” Novick attests. “I mean, Tim wrote it in 2019, I think among other things in response to the wave of Syrian refugees to the U.K. Patrick saw it in 2019 and experienced it as relevant to Trump and the children in cages at the border. And now we find ourselves having just seen an onslaught of stories about Afghan refugees, and now we’ve got people on horses herding Haitian refugees with whips. So it’s always relevant.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘THE CLAIM’
By Tim Cowbury, presented by Shotgun Players
Through: Nov. 7
Where: Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley, show will also be live-streamed Oct. 21 and 28
Tickets: $8-$40; $20 live-streaming; www.shotgunplayers.org
