On Friday, April 11, a staged reading and discussion of Paradise Expressway, a new play by JHI New Media and Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow Chloe Bordewich, was held at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse. The reading was directed by Mika Deneige and stage-managed by Gheeda Mourtada, with a cast composed of University of Toronto undergraduates Dalila Bejar-Ali, Malek Jaziri, Maria Miroshnichenko and Moaz Saber, and community members Melika Ghatea and Mahmoud Shawaf.
Paradise Expressway is set in Cairo, Egypt, in the very recent past. In the play, an Egyptian teacher, Salim, and a Canadian journalist, Cora, come to document the maze of tombs in the historic City of the Dead before they are bulldozed to make way for the Paradise Expressway. But authorities have cracked down harshly on opposition to the project, and they need to keep their profile low. When Cora is overheard asking questions, it sets off a series of events that threaten to upset her friendship with Salim–and land one of them in serious trouble. Moving back and forth between English and Arabic, the play explores surveillance, distrust and the grave consequences of inattention amid the havoc of urban destruction wreaked in the name of progress.
Paradise Expressway, a work of fiction, is Bordewich’s first play. A trained historian, she turned to playwriting to attend to the personal marginalia of her research—especially the ethical dilemmas of conducting that research in a surveillance state and the privilege of doing so as a foreigner. A post-show discussion among cast, crew, playwright and audience addressed the profoundly unequal risks faced by the Canadian and Egyptian protagonists, the resilience of friendship, and the terror of facing arbitrary arrest.
