One night in 2021, Ahmad Meree became a Canadian citizen.
The ceremony was conducted over Zoom in the thick of the pandemic, and it concluded with an unceremonious click. “I closed the computer,” he recalls, “and I thought, ‘Now I’m a Canadian citizen. What does that mean?’”
The question perplexed him. “I was only Syrian last night. There, I needed a visa to go to the washroom. The whole world has started seeing me differently and treating me differently, while I am still the same person.”
Then, the real question hit him: “Am I still the same person?”
Meree has been wrestling with this question for five years, and is finally bringing his answers to the stage in Uncivilized, directed by Radwan Taleb, and premiering October 13, 2026 at Theatre Passe Muraille, a co-presentation with 7Spices Theatre. The Dora-nominated playwright lights up whenever he talks about the show. “It comes from the bottom of my heart,” he enthuses. “Like every show, it’s like a baby. You’re having a baby…. The idea, then it grows.”
“Civilization” as sorting mechanism
At the play’s core is a question about identity. “What is the meaning of identity,” Meree asks, “if it comes down to a piece of paper that defines who you are? And the respect and trust you can get from the rest of the world is based on which country claims you?”
The play’s title came to him in 2022, when certain Western broadcasters covering the war in Ukraine described those who were fleeing as “white, civilized Christian refugees.” The coded subtext was clear to Meree. It made “me and people like me — automatically, in their opinion — uncivilized.” “So you think I’m uncivilized?” he mused. Well, “that’s where the title came from.”
Years on, the anger still simmers, and so does the humour: publicity for the show promises “sharp wit,” and our conversation crackles with it. A word like “uncivilized,” Meree argues, is never just a description. It is a sorting mechanism, applied long before anyone switches on a camera. He decries a system that categorizes people by colour and creed, and declares that “we are the danger.” This is an egregious double standard in a West that sells itself on human rights. “Apparently,” he notes drily, “human rights are not for all humans. They are selective about who is a human and who’s not a human, and who gets to live in safety and who doesn’t.” No hedging is possible:. “That’s scandalous. That’s shame.”
Uncivilized as a direct retort
Uncivilized is Meree’s response to that shame, and his interrogation of the system that feeds it. HIs goal is to “put citizenship and the values of human rights and civilization under the microscope. ‘Come and let’s talk about it. You think you’re doing a good job? You are actually doing a horrible job. You think you are civilized and you think you are fair? You are not.”
On stage, his character Mohammad sits before a single camera, answering an interviewer’s questions. A live feed is projected upstage throughout — a running argument that stories are directed by whoever holds the power to frame them. Here, the interviewer decides what stays in shot. What begins as routine questioning turns into a larger reckoning with the central questions: who is civilized, and according to whom — and who gets to decide.
“It’s a confrontation between the marginalized and those who marginalized them,” Meree notes, “between the categorized and those who categorized them.”
Mining his own story
Meree’s route to Canadian citizenship began long before the Zoom ceremony. Born in Aleppo, he trained at Cairo’s Higher Institute of Theatre Arts and built an award-winning career in Syria and Egypt. Then, the Syrian embassy in Cairo refused to renew his passport unless he returned for military service. He could return home to fight for a regime he despised, or he could cross the sea to Europe and risk drowning. Canada was his third option, and it turned out to be a mixed blessing. “It’s like someone is telling you, ‘I’m taking you to heaven,’ but you didn’t actually choose to go to heaven.”
The play draws on a particular bureaucratic ordeal that he lived. After passing his citizenship test, Meree was singled out for an extra identity interview, which few applicants face. He photocopied passports, both valid and expired, and translated every stamp into English or French. No one told him why he was chosen. “I was afraid to ask,” he admits. Speaking about it publicly gives him a momentary flicker of worry, but he waves it off. “If we can’t also criticize procedure, then I don’t know where the ‘freedom’ is that we’re talking about.”
Though the play draws heavily on his life, he insists it is “not necessarily a biography.” His earlier plays, Suitcase and Adrenaline (the latter nominated for a 2020 Dora for Outstanding Touring Production), each mark a stage in the journey from home to refugee to citizen. Uncivilized turns from the danger he left behind to the bureaucracy of belonging.
Staging Uncivilized
The show’s staging is deliberately unreal. The room on stage might be an interview office, some unnamed place, or even the inside of someone’s head. This is by design, he stresses. The play is a real expression of “the brown Muslim man experiencing the system that claims the values of freedom and liberty and human rights.”
Shannon Pitre plays the interrogator, and Meree speaks about her with evident delight. He first worked alongside her in a different production, while he was still developing the script, and thought, “she will be a great fit for this part.” Before the public casting call, he told his director and dramaturg, “I have someone in mind,” and asked that they see her first. She auditioned, and everyone agreed she was exactly what they were looking for. “I’m a big fan of her work. Everyone, stay tuned. Shannon is doing magic in the show.”
Getting here took three years of grants and workshops: Ontario Arts Council recommender grants, recommended by MT Space and Aluna Theatre; then Toronto Arts Council funding; a first showing at MT Space’s IMPACT festival in Kitchener in 2023;Passe Muraille’s Buzz series in 2024; and an MT Space work-in-progress series in 2025. Meree is also a co-producer of the show through 7Spices Theatre, the collective he co-founded to platform SWANA and Arab artists — so he is writer, performer, and producer at once.
“The only way to get my story out there is to do a lot of things myself, until I can involve more people in it. Until it becomes real, and then I can let go, bit by bit.” Toronto, he notes ruefully, does not make things easy. “It was very bloody getting your work out there, with the lack of funding and the competitiveness of the sector.”
Nonetheless, in the leadup to the show, he has been like a proud parent counting down to a birthday. “It starts with you. It’s a secret. And then, step by step, it grows. And more people get involved.” Then in its fully realized form, it moves into the world. And this is the real parental reward: “once we open the show and I see how it’s resonating with people, I will be over the moon.”
Uncivilized runs October 13 to 24, 2026, at Theatre Passe Muraille’s Mainspace (16 Ryerson Ave.). Pay-what-you-can-afford tickets are $20, $45 or $70, plus a $2.50 fee, and available at passemuraille.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
