Toronto The Good is a smart exploration of what works, and what doesn’t, in 2009 Toronto. Name-checking an assortment of local figures –including Police Chief Bill Blair –playwright Andrew Moodie has crafted a superb tale, full of insight into the ugly realities of modern racism and violence. His last work at the Factory Theatre was The Real McCoy, an accomplished work that explored the life of African-Canadian inventor Elijah McCoy and the various challenges he faced as a black businessman moving from the 19th to the 20th centuries.

Moodie uncovered a wealth of incredible history, while fleshing out a genuinely interesting character and exploring themes of opportunity, race, and ambition. Riot, Moodie’s play from 1992, looked at the Yonge Street riots that resulted after the Rodney King verdict. Toronto The Good, while firmly rooted in the present, comes fraught with all the historical baggage of race relations between the city of Toronto and its inhabitants, but injects a contemporary perspective, and a thoughtful exploration of the people who make up the city. Using the premise of a court case, Moodie explores the inner and outer lives of people who populate not only his work but the city he and three million others call home. It may be a local setting, but the play’s themes are universal.

Opening the play is Thomas Matthews (Xuan Fraser), a thirty-something Crown Attorney. Using an interesting technique of explaining (in present tense) what he’s doing/thinking/saying while simultaneously staying in character (an interesting update of the Shakespearean aside), Thomas takes us through his experience of being stopped and racially profiled while riding his bicycle. The audience is let into the fear, frustration, and humiliation of the entire ordeal in one simple, elegantly staged scene. Then there’s Simon Phillip (Brian Marler), the defence attorney who’s representing a black youth pulled over by the white police officer Thomas is representing. Simon is introduced to us rushing through a harried morning, feeding his two young daughters, miming movements as the girls’ voices are provided by offstage actors. As well as the political, the personal realms of these characters are explored, with the tensions around Thomas’s interracial marriage, and Simon’s boredom and frustration around his own roles as husband and father. Various aspects of the men’s lives are examined with wit and wisdom. Thomas carries the weight of balancing career with history, lightly brushing off his roots in order to get ahead (or, as he puts it, “be the best”), and actor Xuan Fraser perfectly moves through brusqueness to a keen sensitivity as he explores not only the responsibilities of his job, but the hypocrisies inherent within his own beliefs. Brian Marler emulates a perfect mix of sleaze, altruism, and harried frustration as Simon, the would-be-do-gooder, portraying exasperation and passion with equal zeal, as he goes through the motions of readying his children for daycare, meeting with clients, and arranging for a tryst with a hooker in a hotel room. Far from judging, Moodie leaves the interpretation of his characters wide-open, rendering them deeply faulted, yes, but deeply human at the same time.

Just as compelling are the women in Toronto The Good. Far from this being a “boys only” story, Moodie gives equal time and consideration to his female characters. Almanda (Stéphanie Broschart), Thomas’ wife, is a high school teacher expecting her first child; she’s frustrated by the pace and demand of urban life, sometimes longing to return to her native Ottawa. Her worst fears are realized when she comes into conflict with Violet (Miranda Edwards), a black student who refuses to finish an assignment, but, it turns out, is harbouring a dark secret of violence and sexual exploitation. Director Philip Akin shows keen insight into Moodie’s writing; the tragedies of Violet’s life are shown through her teacher’s reactions to the poem she eventually writes. Akin keeps the staging simple as he portrays the teacher, stung with shock and numb with grief, at a clinic awaiting her first ultra-sound appointment. It makes for an interesting contrast of joy and sadness, and actor Stéphanie Broschart brings the conflicted reactions of the young mother-to-be to life with heart-rending realism. In the multiple roles of the police officer, a teenager, and a stripper, Sandra Forsell shows wonderful range. Her police officer is all outer hardness, protecting a wildly emotional and deeply defensive interior life –one that eventually bumps up against Thomas’s muted notions of identity and politics. As Solomon Moseby, the black man at the center of the charges, Marcel Stewart is wildly engaging; the one time his character speaks is when he asks for a job. It’s a telling, powerful moment that lays bare Moodie’s ideas around opportunity, race, and equality. Stewart also doubles as a young IT worker come to fix Thomas’s computer; again, the dialogue is bang-on with regards to Moodie’s own sensibilities and observations about the absurdities of modern (especially racial) relating. As Solomon’s mother, a Toronto Star reporter, as well as the troubled teen Violet, Miranda Edwards shows a wonderful range, moving from the volatility of a teenager to the angry grief of a sister who’s lost her brother to a random act of gun violence.

And it is, in fact, gun violence that lays at the heart of Toronto The Good. Following on the heels of national debates about gun registration, as well as an incendiary cover story in Toronto Life last summer, the issue of guns and violence is one that is one the minds of many concerned citizens. But instead of making a didactic piece of morally simplistic theatricality, Moodie’s open-ended writing, balancing personal, social, political, and professional sensibilities, offers a solution that is much less easily won. The program lists the number of gun crimes in the city in 2006 and 2007, providing statistics and breakdowns on youth-related gun crimes and community-based initiatives to fight the gun proliferation. This ugly, frightening, and deeply confusing reality is what shapes Moodie’s premise, and all the characters contained therein. Set and costume designer Kelly Wolf has given the set a fluid feel, full of moving furniture and graffiti-stained pieces adorning the walls and the chairs, giving the impression that no one can walk away unstained. Akin’s production implies, in subtle tones, that it is every citizen’s responsibility to do something to aid their community and stop the violence. But how? Moodie provides no concrete answers, but he’s given Toronto audiences something to mull over, providing an opening for discussion, learning –and perhaps most importantly –growth. Bravo.