Libraries are generally welcoming spaces, and Vermont’s Haskell Free Library & Opera House, built atop the U.S.-Canadian border, has something of a welcoming superpower, belonging in every sense to two countries. A 2023 play by Kareem Fahmy takes place there, telling the story of five characters, each in need of some kind of sanctuary. A Distinct Society, handsomely produced by Weston Theater Company, is only incidentally a political story. Fundamentally, it’s about family and connection.
The characters are engaging, but the Haskell Free Library itself is the play’s true star. A detailed set surrounds the characters with books, reading spots, a moose head and that diagonal line of black tape crossing the hardwood floor, denoting a national border. The play is set in 2018, when Canadians could enter through a door in the U.S., making the library a transnational space. Viewers can spend the whole play hoping that the library is magical enough to heal the people in it.
Before U.S. border officials barred Canadians from using the main entrance this spring, the library was a refuge for international visits. The play tells one such story, about Peyman, an Iranian cardiac surgeon who went to medical school in the U.S. but returned to Tehran to practice medicine. He’s made the long journey to the Haskell via Canada to see his daughter, Shirin, who’s now in Tufts University’s medical school herself on a student visa. Banned by executive order, Peyman can meet her in the library, entering U.S. space freely.
Family visits like that are happily encouraged by the head librarian, Manon, a French Canadian woman who hums opera while shelving books and sets her own rules for the library. That freedom is a counterbalance to the surrounding province of Québec, which imposes strictures on the use of English to preserve the French language and culture. The library’s adjacent locations of Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Qué., more or less operate as one municipality, and Manon wants the library to feel boundary-less.
Bruce, a friendly U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent with an eye for Manon, is more of a stickler for the rules, which keep changing during the monthlong span covered by the play. The character is sympathetic, but he does wear a gun and a tactical vest. Suspend your image of today’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, seen in bystander cameras as masked vigilantes wrestling people to the pavement and in government videos as hypercompetent military. In 2018, a nice guy like Bruce was possible at a nice border. Still, Bruce doesn’t question the rules he enforces, and the plot will swing on his choices.
Fifteen-year-old Declan is trying to thread his way to adulthood with multiple claims on his identity. He was born in Northern Ireland, where another border divides people. His parents emigrated to Québec when he was 2 months old. Declan has Canadian citizenship and an accent worthy of Toronto, but his town requires him to attend a French-language school. He doesn’t fit in and has made no friends. His parents have divorced, and his father has moved back to Belfast, remarried and started a new family. All told, Declan has no anchor in the world except what he’s found in the graphic novels on the shelves of the library.
Fahmy directs his own play and elicits performances that make all five characters easy to love. What he can’t do is make the script’s three competing stories blend to reveal a larger perspective. A romance, a reunion and a youthful search for meaning through a superhero are each absorbing, but they never amplify each other.
Bruce and Manon are singular and solitary people, so when they’re both inclined to flirt cautiously, we can root for them. But they don’t generate heat. While inevitability may offset the lack of chemistry, Manon seems like too keen a thinker to fall for this guy, and Bruce’s romanticism feels paint-by-numbers.
Meanwhile, Peyman and Shirin yearn to reunite but suffer so many logistical setbacks that their story barely launches. And Declan’s immersion in stories of the superhero Green Lantern offers a fine philosophy of courage but coats it in the overwrought language of comic books, so it feels out of place.
The plot is essentially the slow revelation of each character’s hidden needs. Manon (Polly Lee) is a cauldron of fascinating idiosyncrasies and bears a scar from the Québécois culture wars. Bruce (Jason Bowen) has to choose between his job and his impulse to care for others.
Shirin (Fatemeh Mehraban) carries the weight of a big secret concealed from her father. Peyman (Barzin Akhavan) is a fretful father with a crusader’s zeal for protecting his daughter. Declan (Daniel Clark) squirms with youthful misery and strives to be brave, only to find that bravery is trusting others to understand him.
Because the revelations take time, they feel important, but the only character who vibrates with real discovery is Declan. He closes the play, though it’s Peyman who articulates its theme: “Home is not my country; home is my family.”
The play takes some liberties with the building’s layout, but set designer Alexander Woodward gives it the weight of reality through detail. Lighting designer Minjoo Kim uses big effects to express the passage of time, then conjures an enchanting mood for the ending, using Woodward’s special effects.
With a vigorous pace and fine acting, this production gripped the opening-night audience. Five characters with different languages, cultures and passports must learn to connect beyond those identifiers. The Haskell Free Library becomes a symbol of transcending categorization, of being understood as a person. Fahmy may not braid his story threads into one full tapestry, but he creates endearing people.
The Haskell beckons any visitor to walk up to a line and plant a foot in two different nations. The little thrill dissipates fast, though, because that line is so arbitrary. The play expresses this neatly by showing the weather outside two windows. No border divides the rain.