Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✩
by Asha and Ravi Jain, directed by Ravi Jain
Why Not Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
November 27-December 16, 2012
Asha: “You don’t get to choose any member of your family. Why do you need to choose your wife?”
A Brimful of Asha returns to the Tarragon after its sold-out run last year and before it tours to London, Ontario, and Victoria, BC, next year. Why is the show so successful? It is its combination of abundant humour and unvarnished truth to life. It is a theatre piece that is not a “play” in any conventional sense. Instead, Ravi Jain, an actor, and his real-life mother Asha, a non-actor, tell us the story of how Asha and her husband attempted to arrange a marriage for Ravi when he was on a trip to India. Ravi and Asha are two strong personalities who love and respect each other, but who view the whole notion of an arranged marriage from totally opposing points of view.
The show begins as soon as the doors open. The set is simply a table on an Indian carpet with two chairs backed on two sides by a shiny curtains. In front of the two curtains are large flat screen monitors where images will appear to illustrate various points of the story. Ravi and Asha greet the audience members as they arrive and offer them vegetarian samosas piled high in a bowl on the table alongside some condiments. If you are at all peckish, do try one of the samosas. You aren’t often invited to enter the world of the theatre via the sense of taste. The greetings and the food set the mood for a low-key telling of a family tale.
Asha and her husband were not happy that Ravi chose to be an actor, since as far as they are concern acting is not a profession. They had hoped he would take over the family business. Yet, Ravi knew he wanted to be an actor ever since he saw the Bollywood films of Amitabh Bachchan. Even at the age of five he would entertain his family by lipsynching to one of Bachchan’s famous song-and-dance scenes in the movie Don (1978).
More worrying for Ravi’s parents is that he had reached the age of 27 without getting married and had rejected all his parents’ plans to arrange a marriage for him. Asha and her husband were born in India and still hold to Indian cultural values that they feel are still valid because of their antiquity. Ravi, however, was born in Canada and holds typical modern values. What is so enlightening about A Brimful of Asha is that Ravi gives his mother the chance to explain her point of view in full. Her reasons range from the facetious – that parents know better what their children should do than they do – to the cultural and religious.
In Hinduism and in Jainsim (Ravi and Asha are Jains in name and in religion), life is divided into four ashramas, each lasting about 25 years. The first quarter is the life of a student learning and making preparations for the life ahead. The second is family life, with the assumption that you are married before age 25. The third period is the completion of household duties and the preparation of handing the household to the next generation. The fourth is the period of renouncing the world and all attachments to physical and personal things to prepare for death and reincarnation, or if one has reached perfection, complete liberation from the cycle of reincarnation.
For Ravi, he has just started a theatre company and wants to reach a stable stage in his work when he can afford to get married. For Asha, Ravi is selfish in putting work before his spiritual and familial duties. She worries that if he postpones marriage too long, he will upset the time he has for the four ashramas. She explains the thoroughness with which the parents sort through the “bio data” of prospective brides for suitability based on astrological compatibility and familial standing. The last is quite important because a marriage is not just between two individuals but between two families, and the families must be compatible. Even Ravi, when he objects to a certain choice, will say “But I don’t want to marry her family”.
Ravi’s desire to wait until he is ready or until the right girl comes along is also selfish because it reflects badly on Asha in the community. It is the mother’s job to see that her son gets married and if she doesn’t she is thought of as a bad mother.
All of their discussion is a prelude to the son and mother’s description of events that occurred in 2007. Ravi and his best friend, a non-Indo-Canadian, planned to make a grand tour around India so both could see the sights and so that Ravi could get a better sense of his heritage. Ravi gets suspicious when his father, who makes a years trip to India in November, announces that he will make another trip to be in India while Ravi is there. As it turns out Ravi is right to be suspicious. At first, the lengths that Ravi’s parents go to get him married seem hilariously extreme and make Ravi furious. At the same time, Ravi comes to see that the massive effort his parents are putting into their project stems from a real belief that they are doing what is best for their son.
Ravi could easily have presented the show as a one-man play and have given his parents’ point of view himself. The fact that he has invited his mother onstage to express her point of view only adds strength to her arguments. Besides, the minor mother-son struggles over how exactly to tell the story are amusing in themselves and give us an insight into what the struggles must have been like over the primary issue itself. Also, when Ravi imitates his mother on stage, we see how he exaggerates her voice and accent. To have Asha herself on stage provides a useful corrective to the exaggerated view that a one-man show would have promoted. Asha’s story of her own arranged marriage to an Indian immigrant to Canada gives her desire for Ravi to marry a fascinating perspective.
Glancing over the audience it was clear that Indo-Canadians found the show absolutely hilarious because they understood so well the situation Ravi and Asha describe. It was also clear that non-Indo-Canadians loved the show both because it provides a well-balanced glimpse into the workings of another culture and because the generational combat that plays out in the story and on stage is something everyone can relate to. Besides, the warmth of feeling mother and son have for each other shines through their every exchange. At the end you are filled to the brim with the pleasure of getting to know two remarkable people.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Ravi Jain and Asha Jain. ©2012 Erin Brubacher.
For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.
2012-12-02
A Brimful of Asha