There persists an almost magical notion that a playwright will find the form his or her story requires. Short and long plays begin with the same ambition; short plays simply take less time.

I wrote Kandahar to Canada as a transition—a slip of a play, a dramatic elision: between Paul Watson’s work as a journalist in Afghanistan and his homecoming to Canada, between Roya Shams’s childhood in Kandahar and her adolescence at a boarding school in Ottawa, between the never-ending war “over there” and our variably war-haunted lives as North Americans.

I had been working with Paul Watson for several years in a peculiar partnership that had, by that point, produced The Body of an American, a play, and War Reporter, a poetry collection. Kandahar to Canada also served as a bridge between this earlier work, examining Paul’s career in war reportage generally, and our ongoing collaboration with its focus on more contemporary war zones, his complicated self-extrication from journalism, and my complicated disentanglement from writing about Paul and war.

Explicitly, this is a play about the transformation of a young girl’s life. The fifteen or so minutes dramatized here, derived from Paul Watson’s notes and writing, his photographs and audio recordings, can only allude to the heroic events of Roya’s journey. Her courage is irrefutable and I hope that these pages convey something of her remarkable character to the stage.

I am grateful to editor Mary Flinn and Blackbird for the chance to see this play published. I also wish to thank director Mark Armstrong, who brought this script vividly to life at Ensemble Studio Theatre in Manhattan in 2013, and Paul Watson, who continues to trust me with his images and words and friendship. And of course I am thankful to and for Roya Shams, who has thrived in Canada where she is now a scholarship student at the University of Ottawa.  

Paul Watson is the author of three books, including Where War Lives (McClelland & Stewart, 2007). He is the 1994 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Spot News Photography. His other awards include the 1999 George Polk Award for Journalism in Foreign Reporting and the 1993 Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal.