Crow’s Theatre, Here For Now, House + Body, and b current are presenting the world premiere of The Surrogate by playwright Mohsin Ali Zaidi. The production will be directed by Crow’s Theatre’s Associate Artistic Director Christopher Manousos, and previews began on February 24. Opening night is March 4, 2026.
The new play by the award-winning author and now playwright takes place on a single night in a hospital room. The drama revolves around Jake and Sameer, a successful gay couple. They’re expecting a baby via a surrogate mother, but when Marya, their surrogate, is rushed to hospital with complications, it sparks a crisis.
The story reveals complex themes around parenthood and the way we conceive of it in contemporary society, privilege and power, and the intricacies of creating a family.
LV spoke to Mohsin Ali Zaidi and Christopher Manousos about the play and production.
Mohsin Ali Zaidi
Mohsin Ali Zaidi was born in East London, UK, to Pakistani-British Muslims. He grew up in East London, and went on to study law, obtaining his BA Law with European Legal Studies at Keble College, Oxford, and the Legal Practice Course at the College of Law, London.
He also passed the New York State Bar, and practiced law for four years, along with working at the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Mohsin worked as a judicial assistant in 2013/2014 to Lord Wilson of Culworth and Lord Sumption at the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
In 2018, he was a contributor to the e-book A Little Book of Insider Dealing.
He subsequently practiced as a criminal barrister, and following that, as a management consultant. During that time, he completed his first book of fiction. A Dutiful Boy, a coming of age memoir about growing up gay in a Pakistani Muslim household, was published in 2020. It won a Polari First Book Prize, and the LAMBDA Literary Award for gay memoir/biography in 2021
He’s also written pieces for CNN Style, The i Newspaper, Bustle, The New York Times, and Newsweek, among other publications. He’s been a regular commentator on Britain’s Sky News.
Zaidi is currently based in New York City.
Mohsin Zaidi & Christopher Manousos: The Interview
With a background in the UK and New York, how did Zaidi come to present his first play in Toronto?
“I’m based in New York,” he begins. That’s where the collaboration with Crow’s first began to take shape.
As it turns out, a former board member of Crow’s Theatre read the book, and their paths happened to cross. A conversation developed into a lunch meeting where they discussed his work. Zaidi was about to write another book, but mentioned he also had a play that was already completed. After reading the play through, the former board member asked for permission to share it with Crow’s Theatre members.
“It’s an interesting time for a Canadian to be telling this story,” Mohsin comments.
As a writer, he’s largely known as an author these days, but it turns out his first love was drama.
“I grew up acting in plays when I was younger, and I loved drama,” Zaidi says. “But, basically, like a typical South Asian family, my family didn’t let me do drama in school.”
He didn’t have the money to pursue it on his own, but in university, was exposed to more theatre. As a lawyer, he had the resources to attend professionally produced plays himself.
“I remember just being blown away by the communal nature of it,” Mohsin says. Theatre is a shared experience. “You can watch a film by yourself,” he points out. “There’s something about having everybody in the room experiencing it together. I was drawn to that.”
The Surrogate
In The Surrogate, he feels that the impact of certain scenes, in particular, can only be reached when everyone in the audience is experiencing it together.
“Really, what we’ve tried to do is invite the audience into the discussion,” he says. “I really think the most powerful mechanism to get people talking is to experience it as an audience.”
Certainly, not just the play, but the issue of surrogacy raises many questions that society has yet to resolve.
“[It’s] for the audience to decide who to believe,” Manousos adds.
“He’s done a very expert job of exposing a problem and interrogating it from both sides,” Christopher says, “to look at it in a way that is quite balanced and even.”
As he explains, the audience can enter into the discussion from multiple perspectives, and find themselves either onside or offside with the opinions of the characters on stage.
“The audience can take their own lived experience,” Manousos explains. The characters are as complicated as the situation they find themselves in.
“What’s quite interesting about this play, and dealing with surrogacy, and framing it with the American surrogacy, is that in America there is paid surrogacy,” Manousos points out. In Canada, paid surrogacy isn’t a legal practice. For Canadian queer couples, it means finding a benevolent surrogate who’s willing to do it all for free.
“What happens when your only option is to pay for surrogacy, and what is the bounds, the ethics of that?” Christopher asks. “When does it become exploitation? Is it always exploitation? And to also add, Mohsin has framed the central character of the play as Canadian.”
The Canadian audience, he points out, will grasp the significance of that perspective.
A Hospital Drama
“What kind of captured me is that in my life, I have a longstanding love of TV medical dramas,” Manousos says. “It is an exceptional one night, straight shot, big issue, big problems.”
He points out that, in TV medical dramas, whatever issues are raised need to be solved within one episode.
“It is a riveting roller coaster to be on because of it,” Christopher says. “If you like The Pit on Crave right now, you will especially delight in what Mohsin is serving up in this play.”
“I will say, you know, Christopher when he was reading the script, he said, have you seen The Pit?” Mohsin says. He hadn’t, but eventually checked it out. “I thought, oh my God, they’ve stolen my idea!” he laughs.
“The thing about hospitals,” Manousos says, “is that they are very present in human lives. It sets up a situation that isn’t hypothetical.”
There is an inherent sense of intensity that raises the stakes of the situation.
A Lawyer’s Background
Zaidi’s background as a lawyer played a role in developing the idea into a play.
“When I was in university, I saw this documentary called Capturing the Friedmans,” Zaidi relates. The 2003 HBO documentary directed by Andrew Jarecki covers the 1980s investigation and capture of seemingly everyday couple Arnold and Jesse Friedman. Arnold, and one of their children, were convicted of sexual abuse of minors. “One minute, you were convinced they were guilty, and then the next minute, you were convinced they were innocent,” he says.
Mohsin was drawn to that approach, where you set your readers or audience up with one perspective, only to pull the rug out from under that point of view the next.
“Once I became lawyer, being able to look at an argument [as having] multitudes of ways of looking at something. What I was grappling with in my personal life, as far as surrogacy, was how I felt about it myself.”
The issue sparked his own anxieties and uncertainties. The idea of never telling the audience what side they should fall on appealed to him as a writer.
“Standing in front of a jury,” Zaidi explains. “you have to give a compelling argument.” He also points out that, in the UK, lawyers both prosecute and defend. “It really makes you better at both.”
He tried to inject that idea of perhaps even believing that both sides are true into the play. “That’s the essence of being alive, of being humans,” Mohsin says. “Here’s where the black and white is, but come with me into this area where everything is grey.”
The Toronto Production
The World Premiere production features Fuad Ahmed (Late Bloomer/Crave, Beeba Boys), Thom Nyhuus (Devil In Disguise/Peacock), Sarena Parmar (The Orchard(After Chekhov/Shaw), Antonette Rudder (Wedding Band, Romeo & Juliet/Stratford), and Siddharth Sharma (Late Bloomer/Crave).
“We had a couple of table readings before the play was actually commissioned,” Zaidi relates. Those initial readings immediately sparked a debate among the cast members.
He adds that Manousos’ direction builds those doubts and tensions in the play to a crescendo where the audience has to decide what and who to believe.
“Basically, fight each other,” Zaidi says. “Not physically,” he laughs.
The play developed during rehearsals, Manousos explains.
“What’s incredible about new play rehearsal, is that every team […] wants the script to be perfect from the start,” Christopher says. Inevitably, however, elements that could be enhanced emerge. “There’s a fair amount of things that […] get rewritten. The first week of our process, Mohsin was thankfully here, that week ended up being almost a complete overhaul — while the bedrock of the play remained the same,” he explains.
“That was a very exciting experience for all of us,” Manousos adds. “We made lots of incredible discoveries.”
“I said this to the cast and to Christopher,” Mohsin says, “It was one of the most professionally rewarding weeks in my life. You had a group of really remarkably talented artists.”
Each drew from their own life experiences to add to the discussion “By the end of that week, each of the cast members were teaching us what the character needs,” Zaidi says.
“It was such a privilege to work with them all,” Mohsin adds. “It’s an issue that really matters to people.”
“We set out with the ambition of creating a play that will have some of the most dynamic […] acting that will be seen this season,” Manousos says. “Complex characters and juicy drama, exciting, salacious material.”
- The Surrogate runs at Crow’s Nest Theatre until March 22, 2026. Find tickets and show details [HERE].
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