Relative Good
Thursday, Friday, & Saturday @ 8:00 pm, Sunday @ 2:00 pm, April 29-May 16
Teatro Paraguas and Relative Good Productions will present Canadian playwright David Gow’s harrowing drama Relative Good, opening April 29 with 11 performances through May 16th, 2010.
Relative Good was first produced at the Bank Street Theatre in New York in 2007 under the title Arrivals. The play is based on an incident in September 2002 at JFK Airport, in which a Canadian-Syrian engineer named Maher Arar was detained while returning from a vacation in Tunis to his home in Canada. Suspected of ties to Al-Queda, he was held in solitary confinement for nearly two weeks without being charged, and then shipped to Syria under the practice known as extraordinary rendition. In Syria he was held and tortured for ten months. The Syrian government concluded that Arar had no ties to terrorism.
Karen Paramanandam directs the current production, which features Angelo Jaramillo as Mohammed el-Rafi (Ahar) and Kieran Sequoia as Claire Jenkins, a Canadian diplomat. The cast also includes Angelique Macho, Annie Goodwin, Campbell Martin, and Dylan Voltura.
The Santa Fe production is the third-to-date for Relative Good, which had its Canadian premiere in 2008 at the Centaur Theater in Montreal, directed by the playwright. Gow’s other plays include Bea’s Neice (about a female novelist sequestered in a mental hospital) which was produced in 1999, and Cherry Docs, which premiered at the Factory Theater in Toronto in 1998. Cherry Docs, which concerns a neo-Nazi skinhead charged with murder who is defended by a Jewish lawyer, has been produced in Poland, Germany and Israel. Gow, born in 1964, has also written Do You Have a Moment?, The Flight of Peter Pumpkin-Eater, and The Friedman Family Fortune.
Relative Good opens at the Teatro Paraguas Studio on Thursday, April 29 at 8:00 p.m., with performances on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. through Sunday, May 16. Ticket prices are $12 general, and $10 for seniors and students. The Sunday evening performances on May 2, 9 and 16 are pay-what-you-wish. Seating is limited and reservations are advised. Please call 424-1601 or visit www.teatroparaguas.org
The Teatro Paraguas Studio is located at 3221 Richards Lane Ste.B. Richards Lane intersects Henry Lynch Rd. (an extension of Richards Avenue) between Agua Fria and Rufina.
Teatro Paraguas was founded in 2004 by an international group of actors and artists, and is dedicated to producing bilingual Hispanic/Latino theater and poetry performances. Occasionally, TP produces works it considers of social and political importance which may lie outside of its usual mission.
KUNM-FM review of Relative Good, by Mary Mier:
http://bluecanyonproductions.com/Audio/MaryMier-RelativeGood-KUNM.mp3