His grandfather was in a Nazi unit. This new play is a bracing, if hurried, reckoning with that secret

As Daniel Maslany, who portrays Kushnir, says early on in this bracing drama: “Time is merciless.” Indeed, it constantly slips just out of his reach, no matter how hard he tries — valiantly and breathlessly — to keep up.

But if one of the few benefits of time is that it offers us some much-needed clarity and perspective, “The Division” displays few of those qualities and is instead lost in the whirlwind of its own urgency.

Kushnir was driven to develop this play after receiving an anonymous comment at the bottom of a 2019 Globe and Mail essay he wrote in memory of his late dido, Peter, a watchmaker and Ukrainian immigrant to Canada who designed North America’s last railway-standard pocket watch before train companies switched to computerized clocks. 

Before he arrived in Canada, Kushnir’s grandfather had also served as a messenger in the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army during the Second World War. Peter would later be held in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp, from which he fled to the UK and eventually to Canada. 

Yet unbeknownst to Kushnir at the time, and as that one commenter pointed out, the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division — a Nazi-commanded military unit that fought against the Soviets and was involved in the killings of Poles and Jews. It was this revelation that prompted Kushnir to travel to Ukraine later in 2019 to meet with locals, historians and extended family members to better understand his grandfather’s story. 

Kushnir, who also directs this production, stages the show like a memory play, using found, household items to tell his story. A pair of lamps double as headlights on a car. Filing cabinets transform into chairs. It’s all effective, and this simplicity ensures the production moves easily back and forth between various locations.

Meanwhile, Maslany, who bears a striking resemblance to Kushnir, serves as a steady guide, holding the audience’s rapt attention each time he speaks. He’s joined by Karl Ang, Ivy Charles, Alon Nashman and Mariya Khomutova, who are equally strong as they slip in and out of a multitude of roles, often with just a quick change of accent or outerwear. (The costumes are by Sim Suzer and Niloufar Zaiee, who both also designed the sets.)

“The Division” is part documentary play and part epistolary drama, structured as a letter addressed to Kushnir’s six-year-old nephew, Lev. “I’m writing to the future you. The future Lev. Maybe 15 years from now,” he says. “But the writing cannot wait!” 

The main issue with the show, however, is that it’s also framed as a mystery. With Maslany’s Kushnir as detective, we watch as he scours through his family’s history for clues about his dido, searching for answers to questions he never got to ask his grandfather while he was still alive. 

The problem with this is that it’s not difficult to see early on where Kushnir’s detective work is leading and the painful answers he will dig up. Ultimately, framing the play as a mystery strips it of its momentum, turning it more or less into a didactic history lesson, punctuated with awkward moments of humour. (A scene about Yaroslav Hunka, the Ukrainian soldier who served with the Nazis and was welcomed to the House of Commons in 2023, is mostly played for laughs.) 

I could also feel Kushnir equivocating throughout, trying to reconcile the cold, hard facts of history with the person he knew his grandfather to be. “I want to be clear, Levchik: the story here, for me, for you and me, is not ‘Was our dido a Nazi?’” Maslany, as Kushnir, says in the middle of the play. “That’s the story that we’ve been taught to want, all of us. I’m not telling that story.” But that’s exactly what Kushnir has told us until that point in the play.

Later, the playwright awkwardly shifts gears to focus on the ongoing war in Ukraine, as if he wants to get ahead of possible charges that he’s somehow an unpatriotic Ukrainian because of what he’s written in this play. But this pre-emptive rebuttal is jarring and feels unnecessary in the context of the rest of the work. 

I suspect the reason why the play feels so messy, both tonally and narratively, is that Kushnir was still processing and unpacking his feelings as he was writing it. (He reveals right at the top, in fact, that “The Division” is based on interviews he conducted between 2019 and “as recently as a few weeks ago.”)

But with the material and research being so fresh, I think Kushnir misses out on tackling some broader questions. The play is really about reckoning with one’s legacy and inheritance. There’s something fascinating, in particular, about the secrets that families hold, never spoken aloud because of the pain associated with it. 

This feels especially true for those in the Silent Generation who lived through the Second World War. They buried their traumas. And their children, too, never questioned these secrets. It’s only the next generation — Kushnir’s generation — who began digging up these family stories, driven by the understanding that if these secrets weren’t uncovered now, they could soon be lost forever. I think many people can empathize with this. I certainly did. 

Occasionally, Kushnir does tease these generational tensions. In an early scene, when he tells his baba that he’s heading to Ukraine to look into Peter’s youth, she says to him: “There were things he didn’t want people to know. I’m sure of that. So, talk about his abilities in watchmaking. Stick to the watches.”

But, frustratingly, we never really see Kushnir’s family again in the play after this early scene. And we never get to see them reckon with what he’s discovered about their dido.

Maybe Kushnir’s family hasn’t had these difficult discussions yet. That’s certainly understandable. But if that’s the case, then in his rush to put his ideas on the page, I think this play could do with more of the one thing Kushnir is afraid to lose: time.