When Steve Neufeld returned to Canada after making a documentary film about poverty-stricken people in India, Kenya, Thailand and Malaysia, he was all fired up with the desire to help change their lives.
“I got home with a pretty intense feeling . . . I was on fire to tell our story to all the people we met and get them interested in doing more to help solve extreme poverty around the world,” recalled the co-producer of a low-budget film called E is for Everything.
Neufeld wasn’t prepared for the apathy he encountered from some Albertans or their rationalizations about their cushy Western lifestyle, when what he wanted to find was “almost a physical aura of hope.”
The Red Deer resident who teaches high school in Sylvan Lake and has always dabbled in creative writing, sank his disillusionment into the first play he ever penned, called Tumaini.
He created a character named Terry, whose desire to make a difference in the Third World is so stymied that he begins to hallucinate about a giggly African girl. Except for this fantasy vision and some of the details, the one-act play is very autobiographical, said Neufeld, who felt Terry’s pain.
“It was very hard for me, at least for the first year or two.”
Neufeld’s frustration lifted as he became involved with the Lacombe charity A Better World. For the past few years, the teacher who moonlights as a playwright has been working with his students to expand a Kenyan school. This has helped ease his conscience and rid him of some western guilt.
But writing Tumaini — which received professional input through Scripts at Work workshops and was turned into a film by a Red Deer College student — made Neufeld arrive at an important realization: theatre can be a tool for change.
He admitted, with a laugh, that he tends to write about the topics that matter most to him — and hopefully without too much of a didactic tone.
“I’m a ranter. I have to work hard on the stories and characters and let people reach their own conclusions.”
His second play, Unnatural Selection, is about the religious right’s intolerance about homosexuality. But it doesn’t slam religious institutions. The play recognizes that some gay people need to feel a connection to a church. One of its messages is “you don’t have to agree with a bunch of people to seek truth with them,” said Neufeld, whose second play also benefitted from the professional scrutiny received through the Scripts at Work process.
The drama that premiered in Red Deer during Central Alberta Theatre’s One-Act Play Festival and had a successful run at last summer’s Edmonton Fringe Festival was inspired by real life.
In Unnatural Selection, two roommates are accused of being gay at a Bible college. In actuality, one of Neufeld’s friends was similarly accused by his college’s “Dean of Men,” but laughed it off, because he wasn’t homosexual.
The assumption that being gay was immoral incensed Neufeld and made him wonder how a student with same-sex inclinations might have felt if he overheard the accusation.
Since the playwright wrote Unnatural Selection to get people examining their own reactions to homosexuality, he was encouraged when a pastor who saw the play told him it should get people talking about it.
Neufeld wasn’t always a liberal thinker. He attended Christian schools as a child and was raised as a member of an evangelical church before rethinking some of the church’s teachings as an adult.
This happened gradually. “I’ve never had any sudden epiphanies. For me, (change) is a super slow process,” said Neufeld. “You read things, you meet people. I am constantly re-evaluating.”
He was at university when one of his close friends came out as gay, and Neufeld remembers this revelation shook his learned belief system.
“I felt uncomfortable holding conservative values when I had a friend saying, ‘I did not choose this, this is not a choice.’ ”
Last year, Neufeld and his wife Emily made a monumental choice that dramatically changed their own lives — they adopted a toddler from an Ethiopian orphanage.
The decision wasn’t made because the couple had fertility problems, but because they wanted to make a positive difference in a child’s life. “We chose adoption because it was a good thing to do,” said Neufeld, who believes his son Behailu now has more opportunities.
But the two-and-a-half-year adoption process was “horrific” — largely because a high-ranking official embezzled money from the Canadian adoption agency in order to fund her own plastic surgery, grinding the whole process to a halt at one point.
Emily and four other adoptive mothers formed their own support system to get through the worst days. Neufeld has recently been rereading their exchanged emails to find inspiration for his next play — which will be about the foreign adoption experience.
“A lot of people think there’s all this corruption in Africa, yet it was a westerner — a Canadian lady — getting the plastic surgery. . . . The Africans were working for free in order to help the kids,” said Neufeld, who wishes he could have made a documentary about the adoption process.
But a play will have to do, he added with a chuckle.
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com