The Runner: running to and from identities, guilt and morality
1 Dec 2018

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Graham Isador

Jacob works for ZAKA, an Israeli volunteer organization that responds to terrorist attacks, accidents and natural and unnatural disasters. ZAKA volunteers, mostly Orthodox Jewish men, not only tend to the wounded but also collect the remains to ensure a proper burial in accordance with the Jewish faith. Jacob is the first to arrive on the scene where an Arab girl appears to have stabbed an Israeli soldier before being shot herself. The soldier is beyond help but the Arab girl is still, barely, alive. Jacob who believes that ZAKA's mission is to help everyone regardless of race, religion or creed, saves the girl's life with CPR, ingesting a mouthful of blood in the process.

The play The Runner is a monologue by Jacob as he skips through time and life events trying to sort out questions of responsibility, guilt and morality. Though Jacob has responded to many disasters, and helped with the excavation of a mass grave in the Ukraine, his prioritizing of the Arab girl earns him a demotion and his life begins to, literally, explode. The monologue is presented while Jacob runs, walks and occasionally stands or falls on a treadmill that protrudes out of the darkness to the edge of the audience. It is a short concise metaphor for Jacob's attempts to run to and from his various identities, and the aforementioned guilt. It is also unfortunately a metaphor, as are the blazing lights that punctuate the monologue, for a final reveal that, while most will see coming, is a cheat and robs The Runner of the relentless power it has built up.

Though PTSD is never mentioned, Jacob is obviously in dire need of psychological help after all he has seen and experienced. And that is not taking into account his family, a stereotypical Jewish mother of the nagging variety who he lives with, and a successful but unscrupulous brother. Gord Rand who is tasked with conveying the words, and the physical feat of doing so while in constant motion, is suitably heroic and fragile. He understates the horrors making them all the more vivid and reflects a wild-eyed confusion about what is happening to him. It is a naturalistic and flawless performance taking place in a mysterious netherworld.

There is one other complication. Jacob is a closeted gay man. The jibes about his "Arab girlfriend" pierce him, his man crush on his ZAKA team leader Yossi is torturous, his father's deathbed blessing of Jacob's lifestyle haunts him as much as his mother's determination to see him married and producing grandchildren torments him. Returning to Israel from the physically and psychologically brutal job of excavating the mass grave, Jacob impulsively abandons returning home to Jerusalem and grabs a cab to a bathhouse in Tel Aviv. Cue more guilt.

The scene where Jacob explores the bathhouse is powerful, both in performance and staging, but it is disconnected. It is meant to be a shocking reveal but it is also one that feels extraneous rather than another layer of character. And that is the overarching problem with The Runner. Christopher Morris's script delivers intense intriguing scenes that are visually enhanced by Daniel Brooks' evocative visualizations, but it is all tied together by the deus ex machina of a Twilight Zone twist. The treadmill and events are relentless but they are sound and fury that goes nowhere.

Individual moments will break your heart - the tale of the mass graves, the restaurant - and the description of life with mother is pitch black comic levity dryly delivered. The bathhouse scene is erotic and visually stunning, the sadness and horror that etches Rand's face as Jacob tries to communicate his reaction to a gun accident comes close to inducing PTSD in the audience. Each scene builds in ferocity as the treadmill revs up and when the climactic explosions happen, the entire audience jumps out of their seats. 

If only The Runner had the cohesion to make the final moments as explosive and charged. But then The Runner is not just about Jacob even though he is our guide into this terrifying world we are part of. All of Israel's history is touched on, questions of the limits of compassion, of politics as morality, how faith suffocates more than it uplifts, surface and refuse to go away. The Runner is tackling a lot of difficult and frightening issues and they are quite possibly ones that can't be resolved, but just presented in all their contradictions and human frailty. Exactly how a ZAKA volunteer must feel.