Since the introduction of the Travel Ban, has there been a quantifiable increase in Islamophobia? After being officially pulled out of the Paris Agreement, will present and future Americans suffer more greatly from the effects of global warming? These topics are tackled in John Lanou’s Love in Three Scenes, an odd but generally engaging show is split into three distinct scenes meant to explore whether there can be love in this “age of rage.”
My review of its first scene comes with a big caveat: it was intended to be performed in Arabic, but one of the actors was unable to make the production. Therefore, Lanou filled in for this role, and the dialogue was done solely in English.
The scene starts in black with a lovely Muslim prayer. The lights come up to reveal two men (Lanou and Muath Edriss) who seat themselves at a table. What follows is a casual conversation between an immigrant who has recently come to America (having left at least some of his family behind), and another immigrant (Edriss) who’s been here longer. As the former expresses his anxieties about living in what he sees as a fearful country, the latter reassures him, citing some interesting historical facts about how Islam was addressed in early America. Edriss then takes out an oud (a beautiful stringed instrument popular in the Eastern Mediterranean) and sings a folk song. After some more conversation, Edriss then leads the other man in an Arabic rendition of the National Anthem – a deeply inspiring and hope-filled moment.
The scene feels as though the audience is sitting in on a real conversation between two men of faith. The dialogue (as translated into English) is a bit on the nose, and it was hard to suspend my disbelief that Lanou was, in fact, an immigrant from a predominantly Muslim country. Although this scene is interesting, I regret that I wasn’t able to see it as it was intended.
After a scene change that went a bit too long, the audience was pulled into a much different place: a lecture hall at a Nova Scotian University in the future. A professor (Lanou), having arrived by canoe, proceeds to give a PowerPoint lecture on developments post-2018 (exponential jumps in the global temperature, a 20-year drought across North America, and a four-year war in the Great Lakes region). This format came at the cost of having a strong character performance. The professor was simply your average professor delivering a normal, glitch-filled lecture which plays into our real world fears while feeling intimate and meaningful.
In the final scene, the audience is met by a life-size Trump figure, his mouth mid-yell. A man (Lanou) comes to clean out rocks and coal from its insides, finding a single candy heart. After filling the figure up with more candy hearts, he invites the audience to put even more of them into the Donnie doppelganger. The result felt like an otherworldly religious mass, made even more surreal in its setting at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church.
Love in Three Scenes . written and directed by John Lanou . Featuring John Lanou and Muath Edriss . Presented at Capital Fringe 2018.
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