Review: She Has A Name
Liz Nicholls
Innocence exploited, tortured, and abused is a terrible thing to see. Can one man make a difference? Well, apparently not, except perhaps to himself. Bravely, She H…
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edmontonjournal
Innocence exploited, tortured, and abused is a terrible thing to see.

That’s the mode of She Has A Name, a vivid activist play from Calgary’s Burnt Thicket Theatre that arrived in Edmonton this week as part of its 13-city Canadian tour. By Red Deer’s Andrew Kooman, it’s designed to galvanize social awareness and moral outrage about human trafficking, a multinational operation of overwhelming scale that kidnaps poor children across Asia and, among its profit-making ventures, enslaves them as prostitutes in brothels. On Tuesday, when She Has A Name opened on the Catalyst stage, U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech to the Clinton Global Initiative addressed this very horror, with a call to action.

It’s not, of course, that any reasonably civilized person is ever going to come down squarely on the side of human trafficking. There’s no drama in that, except perhaps to an audience of johns (and even then …). And Innocent Victim isn’t a role with any nuance either. What Stephen Waldschmidt’s production sets about doing is personalizing one victim, sweet-faced Number 18 (Evelyn Chew) in a Bangkok brothel called The Pearl, and then demonstrating the odds against her rescue.

Which leaves conflict in the hands of Jason (Carl Kennedy) and The Pimp (the same excellent actor). The former is the idealistic Canadian lawyer who leaves his wife and kids on a sort of Asian spirit quest to see if one man can make a difference. The latter, who like Number 18 has long since lost his name, is a villain who already knows the answer since he represents the ruthless spirit of pure human greed.

Number 18’s potential saviour arrives in the play fully formed; he’s already decided to give activism a shot before we meet him, much to his wife’s dismay. So we don’t really know what motivates him. But Jason’s encounters thereafter are a matter of escalating fear and self-doubt. He meets a lethally duplicitous madam (Sienna Howell-Holden). He has a series of fractious but rather schematic meetings with his driven, stressed-out boss (Glenda Warkentin) who sees Number 18 not as a person, as Jason comes to do, but “evidence.”

The play’s least successful device is a sort of Greek chorus of robed and ghostly figures who float around the stage looking vaguely concerned and chanting vaguely poetic lamentations about Number 18’s lost childhood, squandered dreams and memories, fading hope, etc. “We wait for you, God,” they say. “She relives the memory (of rape) every time a man walks through that door. … He walks away unscathed.” The idea, I guess, is to remove the burden of backstory from the girl herself, but the writing thuds dismally.

Wraiths apart, the performances in Waldschmidt’s production are compelling. Chew has a certain luminosity as innocence violated and wary, but still bearing shreds of hope in all in the wreckage. Kennedy delivers intense and committed performances in his double, counterpoised roles. And the others, including van Haastert, who’s unexpectedly moving as Jason’s neglected wife, are strong too.