By Hamutal Dotan

Photo courtesy of SummerWorks.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process, so we are often told, is full of missed opportunities. So too, unfortunately, is QuipTake’s production of Apricots, which takes that process and the conflict that underlies it as its subject. There is no shortage of material to work with, and the play opens quite promisingly with duelling speeches by the leaders of Israel and Palestine, punctuated with interjections by a bombastic and self-congratulatory American president. The premise of that scene—in which the politicians say what is really on their minds, what we all know is really on their minds, but what protocol will forever prevent them from saying out loud—is precisely what a play on this particular topic calls for: using the truth as a tool to skewer the pretensions and prejudices of everybody involved.
Unfortunately, Apricots soon veers off-track, unable to decide between satire and absurdity, and resorts to a number of fantabulous scenarios (a pair of somewhat goofy rocket-launching Palestinians masquerading as gravediggers conning the Palestinian president into thinking that he has raised the dead, for instance), which distract from the real issues, and the real opportunities for humour they provide. Apricots is based on the real-life story of Ertas, a Palestinian village south of Bethlehem and also near the Israeli settlement of Efrat. In 2007 Israel uprooted Palestinian fruit trees to make room for a sewage system to treat waste from the Israeli settlement. That chain of events anchors the play, and it’s certainly a worthy subject. Layering on the buffoonery too thickly undermines this central premise, however, and strips Apricots of the pathos and insight it could have had.
The next performance of Apricots is tomorrow at 10:30 p.m.
SummerWorks runs until August 16 at various locations around the city. Check back for Torontoist’s daily coverage throughout the festival.