Social Studies at Centaur Allows you to Laugh Through a Moving Story
In the play “Social Studies”, now playing at the Centaur Theatre, you are invited into Val’s (Jane Wheeler) home. She has two 
daughters, 16-year-old Sarah, played perfectly by newcomer Emily Tognet, and an older daughter Jackie who unexpectedly shows up at home distraught after breaking up with her husband of seven years. Eleanor Noble, who hits the right notes playing the overly excitable Jackie, is surprised to learn that her Mom has given her old room to a young man from Sudan.
The first time playwright, Tricia Cooper, has taken a difficult subject of the 20,000 lost boys who were orphaned and displaced during the 1983-2005 Sudanese War and made it quite palatable for the general public – it’s a comedy which makes you think. She writes from a place of knowledge, as her own mother did the same thing.
Unusually, the director, Paul Van Dyck, was a “lost Canadian boy” in Sudan when families there took him in, so he too has added a real perspective to the saga. The hook of using Sarah as narrator to tell the story to her high school class gives depth to the background of the Sudanese story, i.e. “92% of these boys have been shot at”.
Jane Wheeler’s spot-on Val – do-gooder, self-righteous Mom – has given a safe haven to Deng (played amazing by Jaa Smith-Johnson), who had wandered barefoot across Africa. She protects him fiercely, even over and above the needs of her own daughters.
So there you sit as the arbiter of who or what is right and wrong as the plot deftly moves from daughter to daughter to “son” to Mom. You watch as the cultures clash and the generations clash, as this black orphan man who comes from such different social mores has to cope with a middle class white family in Winnipeg. The ending is not what you would expect.
Montreal connections: We can be proud that Emily Tognet is a graduate of the Concordia University Fine Arts program, Jaa Smith-Johnson is a graduate of Dawson’s Professional Theatre Program and Eleanor Noble is one of Montreal’s own.
Location: 453 St-Francois Xavier
corner: Notre-Dame
Tel: 514-288-3161
Dates: til Nov 30
www.centaurtheatre.com
Metro: Place d’Armes