A Line in the Sand
By Guillermo Verdecchia & Marcus Youssef
In the autumn of 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, two young men, one a troubled Canadian soldier, the other a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer, meet in the scorched Qatari desert. Breaching the divide of a profound cultural misunderstanding and against a backdrop of massive global conflict, these two become unlikely and secret friends. This tenuous friendship is severed by the torture and murder of the 16-year-old Palestinian inside the Canadian base—an act to which the Canadian soldier was at least a witness and perhaps a willing participant.
Inspired in part by L’Etranger by Albert Camus and the actions of Canadian soldiers stationed in Somalia in the early 1990’s, A Line in the Sand anticipated the now seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Syria, as well as events like Abu Ghraib. The play rips the benevolent mask off western interventions in the middle east and tells an achingly personal story about two almost children implicated in horrors perpetrated with our money, in our names and by people like us.
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