The Surrogate At Here For Now Theatre
The Surrogate by Mohsin Zaidi provides a smashing opening for Here For Now’s 2026 season. Under the shrewd, kinetic direction of Christopher Manousos the play grabs the audience by the gut immediately and doesn’t let go.
Zaidi has crammed a lot (arguably too much) into The Surrogate’s 95-minute running time. The morality of paid surrogacy, the dynamics of economic inequality in gay relationships, dealing with homophobic family members, the advisability of open relationships (“Loving someone and f**king someone are two different things!”), the vagaries of U.S. state laws on surrogacy, the personal agony of failed IVF treatments, and the horrors of America’s healthcare system or lack thereof, are among the themes touched on. I may have missed some.
New York-based Canadian-Muslim Sameer (Fuad Ahmed), a wealthy and aggressive lawyer, and sweet wannabe writer and YouTuber Jake (Thom Nyhuus) have hired Marya (Sarena Parmar), a Muslim widow from Houston to be the surrogate for their child.
Marya’s stated desire is to help a fellow Muslim have a child, but her husband’s enormous medical debt may be the more salient motivation.
While visiting her 18-year-old son who is in college in Louisiana, a seizure lands her in the hospital where, her pregnancy in peril, she is being cared for by hyper-competent nurse Christina Bedford (Antonette Rudder).
Jake and Sameer rush in from New York, Sameer very much aware that Louisiana, unlike Texas, does not recognize surrogacy. Marya must be moved immediately. Nurse Bedford is having none of it.
Adding to Sameer and Jake’s angst, Marya is starting to think she wants to keep her baby.
A second seizure makes it clear that the child should be delivered prematurely, but that requires the consent of a family member. Marya’s son (Siddharth Sharma) is summoned to make the fateful decision.
What makes this improbably melodramatic juggernaut work as well as it does is the combination of Manousos’ production and his superb cast. For his part, Zaidi turns in some razor-sharp dialog leavened with the occasional touch of humour.
Nyhuus makes Jake an intensely sympathetic character. Starting out as an almost comic figure he weathers some heavy emotional blows and emerges at the more mature member of the relationship. It’s a beautiful performance. As the mercurial Sameer, Ahmed has a tougher assignment, but he manages to square the circle and make a very problematical human being sympathetic if not exactly admirable.
Perhaps the strongest performance in The Surrogate comes from Rudder, who was so impressive in Wedding Band a few seasons back. Here she turns in a performance every bit as powerful. Zaidi saddles the character with far too many plot chores, but Rudder carries it off masterfully.
As the surrogate herself, Parmer, who I’ve enjoyed in frothier roles at Shaw, is heartbreaking as the desperate and conflicted Marya.
The pulse-pounding tension that propels The Surrogate comes not just from Manousos’ breathless pacing. The dramatic lighting design of Chris Malkowski (presumably adapted to Here For Now’s space by Christopher Elizabeth) and the cinematic sound design of Maddie Bautista, with Emilie Trimbee, are indispensable in creating the edge-of-your seat excitement that powers The Surrogate to its somewhat ambiguous ending.
Scott Penner has created a three-quarters round configuration to house a bilious green hospital setting that, quite rightly, sets your teeth on edge. All in all, this is the most technically sophisticated show I’ve seen at Here For Now, which has mastered the art of creating magic from the simplest of stagings.
Are there faults to be found with The Surrogate? Indeed there are and the morbidly curious can surf the internet to find plenty of naysayers saying nay.
For my part, I am unwilling to look too closely into the mouth of this gift horse. The cast, director, and production team of The Surrogate provided me one of the most stimulating 95 minutes of theatre in recent memory.
Zaidi, a British writer and barrister of Pakistani descent, now resident in New York, has had a distinguished and varied career. The Surrogate is his first play, for heaven’s sake, and in the rather shopworn phrase it shows immense promise. So let’s cut the guy some slack.
The Surrogate is a world premiere co-produced with Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre (Manousos is Crow’s Associate Artistic Director). It is their third collaboration. The other two were Girls and Boys (2022) and Dinner with the Duchess (2024), all of them terrific.
The Surrogate continues at Here For Now Theatre through April 26, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Here For Now Theatre website.
Footnote: I have no idea why The Surrogate found its world premiere in Canada. For fairly obvious reasons, besides it setting in Louisiana, this play cries out to be mounted in New York and elsewhere in the United States. Let’s hope that the fact it first appeared north of the Poutine Curtain will not doom it to oblivion in my benighted homeland.
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