Proclaiming the obvious is a common flaw of plays by actors-turned-playwrights, who tend to focus more on technique than content. With Multitudes, John Hollingworth thinks his fellow Brits are not sufficiently aware that anti-immigrant bigotry exists in England, that impressionable teenagers may be seduced by terrorist recruiters into committing reckless deeds, or that do-gooders who align themselves with high-visibility radical factions may encounter suspicion, censure, and notoriety from their neighbors. In order to rectify this perceived ignorance, he proposes to illustrate the negative effects of xenophobia. (Nobody yet has found any positive ones.) His parable is set in the city of Bradford, a Midlands community in the United Kingdom, whose population is 20-percent South Asian. Councillor Kash, the son of Muslim immigrants, plans to run for Parliament and has tailored his upcoming speech before members of his Conservative Party to reflect multicultural tolerance. Meanwhile, a crowd of protesters against military intervention in the Middle East hold quiet vigil from their encampment on the conference grounds. What could go wrong? It turns out that plenty can go wrong. On the eve of Kash's presentation, his Anglo-Saxon girlfriend, Natalie, announces that she has converted to Islam, and his daughter, Qadira, seeks the company of the tent-city occupants. When a Muslim woman is severely injured in a fall, rumors immediately circulate that she was pushed, leading to violence in the streets. Natalie is aghast, Qadira is angry, and reporters from the London news bureau are ecstatic. Perhaps because we Yankees are familiar with civil unrest—or, at least, with artistic expressions thereof—our response to Hollingworth's emotion-fueled tales of homefront atrocity is less likely to be shock and horror, and more in keeping with Kash's dismay at the naivete of his kin, who clearly have given no thought to the consequences of their actions. "What did you expect?" he rebukes Natalie, whose accounts of brutal beatings inflicted by hostile skinheads echo those emerging from Belfast in the 1970s or our own Southern states in the 1960s. The combined expertise of the Rasaka and Vitalist companies—notably, director Liz Carlin Metz, no stranger to sprawling didactic narratives—strives mightily to inject human elements into a talking-heads text further cluttered by Brock Alter's video footage of World Events and actors double- and triple-cast, editorializing in Catherine Gillespie's pinpoint-accurate Yorkshire dialect. While the sad truth is that all social conflict, whatever its purported goals, has a way of exacting collateral damage among its citizenry, Hollingworth's efforts to "represent multitudes" in his sermon ultimately undermines his good intentions.
