Mideast views on campus set tone for play’s conflict

Jerome Bourgault

Actor Jerome Bourgault, 52, takes on the role of GW in Teatron Toronto Jewish Theatre’s production of Doron Ben Atar’s Peace Warriors, a play set against the backdrop of Israeli-Palestinian politics on university campuses. 

GW, which stands for Geoffrey Warshawksi, is the son of Holocaust survivors who settled in London. He has become a world renowned academic.

“The play centres around the lives of Ivy League academics – they’re very much the intellectual liberal elite,” explains Bourgault, an Ottawa native, who has resided in Toronto for the last two years. “It takes place over a weekend at the home of Darryl and Scooter Lewis, who are both academics and have a daughter named Gwen. They live in New Haven because the mom, Darryl, is a professor of gender studies at Yale University.”

GW is an overnight houseguest at the Lewis home.  They helped him get his tenured position at Columbia University. He and Darryl are idealists who are very vocal and active in liberal academia, especially in their views on Israel. The fact that they are both Jewish gives a distinct flavour to the play.

“The politics is going to be right in the audiences’ faces,” Bourgault says. “It’s going to mark them if they like it or not. We in the cast are working on it as a very complex relationship play that has reached a tipping point, and that’s what the audience is walking in on. Things are poised to ignite in some fashion.”

Bourgault says it’s a play that will challenge viewers.

“Audience members will be touched by this emotionally, and will want to react, and obviously, this play was written to touch a nerve. I’m hoping that it succeeds in that way. It is a very multi-layered story – there is a lot going on in addition to the politics. The politics is very obvious but it does take a backseat to much more personal dramas between these people when the characters go off in different directions over the years.”

Bourgault was raised in a French- Canadian household, and English was his second language.

“This type of politics is not something I’m too familiar with. I consider myself politically liberal, although there are certain elements of their politics that I won’t necessarily agree with,” he says.  

Bourgault recommends that audiences remember they are watching a play. It isn’t reality. “You are watching characters that are drawn as caricatures.  Certainly, some of it does sound a little bit familiar, I have family who live in the States, who could maybe be their neighbours.  It has shone a light on that kind of dynamic for me, I have never done anything quite like this play before.” 

Bourgault, a former  graphic designer and copywriter stumbled into acting at the age of 38, when he answered an audition call in community theatre in North Bay, where he was living at the time. Peace Warriors is his first play in Toronto. He has appeared on television in Nikita, Lost Girl and Reign.

The father of two daughters, Rose, 13, and Zoe, 17, Bourgault is also a fiction writer, illustrator, designer, visual artist and sculptor.

The cast also includes Dawn Sadler as Darryl,  Becky Grimman, Sam Rosenthal and Nicole Marie Mccafferty. 

Peace Warriors runs at the Toronto Centre  for the Arts, Studio Theatre from Nov. 5 to 16. For tickets,  call Ticketmaster at 1-855-985-2787 or online at www.teatrontheatre.com or at the Toronto Centre for the Arts box office.