THE 20TH OF NOVEMBER by Lars Noren, directed by Brendan Healy, with Sina Gilani. Presented by Buddies in Bad Times, 12 Alexander). Opens Thursday (September 17) and runs to October 4, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2:30 pm. $20-$37, Sunday pwyc. 416-975-8555. See listing.
In his final production as artistic director at Buddies in Bad Times, Brendan Healy gives us a glimpse of its future. He’s cast up-and-coming actor Sina Gilani, an alumnus of Buddies’ Young Creator’s Unit and PrideCab, as the lead in the season opener, Swedish playwright Lars Noren’s unflinching examination of the real-life writings and recordings of the perpetrator of a German school shooting.
Noren drew most of the text verbatim from the extensive trove of blog posts and videos recorded by Bastian Bosse, an 18-year-old living in Emsdetten, Germany, who in 2006 attacked his old high school, wounding five people before killing himself.
“It’s not an easy part to play,” Gilani admits about the very dark side of his biggest role to date. “It’s emotionally, physically, psychologically draining, both as an actor and just as a human being.”
But in dramatizing the events leading up to the attack, the show’s goal is to push past the “monster myth” and take a wider view of why such violence occurs.
“After first reading the script, I was terrified,” says Gilani. “But what spoke to me was [Bosse’s] humanity. Beyond his madness, underneath it all is a person, and I’ve been trying to get to that place – to not demonize him or judge him but get to his pain, his suffering.”
To get into the shooter’s mindset, Gilani and Healy did lots of homework, studying everything from the psychological impact of World War II on the collective German psyche to the philosophers, movies and music Bosse liked.
“The research has been really wide – specific to the person, but also to German culture and the wider culture of violence. I read Heidegger, Nietzsche, and we watched documentaries about Columbine and actually a lot of The Matrix, where much of his imagery and attitudes came from.”
At the same time, Gilani maintains that the story is about more than gun violence.
“It would be a misrepresentation of the work to bring it down to the level of high school shootings and the morality surrounding that. The piece works as a metaphor to digest not just high school shootings, but to see other things we are dealing with locally and globally.”
Gilani, who studied acting at Humber and playwriting at the National Theatre School, stresses that he would not have been able to tackle such troubling material without strong support from Healy and the rest of the crew. Together, the team uses the shooting to expand Healy’s far-reaching analysis of queerness – which Gilani says can refer to outsiders of all kinds.
“I have so much respect for Brendan’s artistic vision. He opens up ‘queer’ not as a defined thing, but as something to be continuously explored. My understanding of queer, who I am, what I’ve been through as an immigrant and refugee from Iran, was my main route to get inside the character and to understand his soul, his mind and body. To be queer – to be the other when society rejects you and pigeonholes you, gives you a different perspective. With this character it’s, like, what happens to you when your view of yourself is not reflected back?”
Gilani says Healy and Buddies have been crucial to more than just his artistic career.
“I owe so much to the arts, particularly Brendan and Buddies, in helping me understand who I am and what I want to be, and what my work is about. I would go as far as to say that a lot of my English – the fact that I speak the language – has been through Buddies and the arts scene of this city. This is the only place where I’ve really felt welcome.”
stage@nowtoronto.com | @jordanbimm