Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✩✩✩
by Anupama Chandrasekhar, directed by Kelly Thornton
Nightwood Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 30-February 16, 2014
Malini: “You know how things get blown out of proportion here”
Nightwood Theatre has opened its season with the North American premiere of Free Outgoing by Indian playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar. Toronto has seen a number of plays by Canadian playwrights with roots in the Indian subcontinent, but Free Outgoing gives us window into the concerns of women living in India now. The play is so gripping for most of its 90 minutes that it is disconcerting when the playwright suddenly changes its tone at the very end.
The action is set in 2007 in a predominantly Tamil area of Chennai (formerly known as Madras). Malini (Anusree Roy) is a widowed hardworking saleswoman trying to bring up her two children, Deepa and Sharan (Andrew Lawrie) on her own. She especially wants them to get a good education and is proud at how well they are doing in school. It is beyond her comprehension, therefore, when the school principal (Ellora Patnaik) visits with the news that 15-year-old Deepa has been suspended from school for having engaged in illicit sexual acts with a male classmate. The situation is even worse than that. As Santhosh (Ash Knight) the boy’s father shows her, his son videoed the couple’s sexual encounter on his cellphone and the video is now on the internet.
Chandrasekhar explores two themes. The first is the double standard that judges the woman more harshly than the man if the two engage in consensual sex. While both Deepa and the boy are suspended for the same period of time, the community turns on Malini and her family not on Santhosh and his. The second theme is the impact of modern technology on an ancient culture. When Malini hears of the video, she wants Santhosh to find every boy who has downloaded it and force them to delete it. It is horrible when she realizes her own naiveté that now there is no longer any control over such material. Once it is on the net, her daughter’s shame, which is now her mother’s shame, can never be hidden. New technology has only exacerbated the effects of the double standard.
Chandrasekhar carefully escalates the tension. With each revelation Malini must deal with even worse than the last. When the media gets hold of the story and stakes out her flat, their vehicles so clog the street that water can no longer be delivered. The community that had already turned against Malini and her daughter now want them expelled, ignoring the fact of how their own prurience has contributed to the situation. Symbolically, what Malini sells is a solution for removing tarnish from silver. Now she finds herself in a world where a moral stain can immediately become ubiquitous and irremovable.
As Malini fails in one course of action after another, it seems that the play is headed directly for tragedy. Oddly enough, it does not and concludes with a satire of the media. On the one hand, Chandrasekhar shows this as Malini’s final descent into shame since her only option is to exploit her own daughter’s notoriety herself. On the other hand, this ending releases the accumulated tension in laughter and seems to undermine the serious points the playwright has made to this point.
Those familiar with Anusree Roy’s own solo shows will not be surprised at her seemingly inexhaustible reserves of fierce energy. She carefully charts Malini’s change of attitude from disbelief to vehemently defending her daughter to finally calling her a “whore” herself. Her horrified reaction to seeing her daughter’s sex video with its mixture of horror, disgust and denial, is excruciating to watch. Roy’s skillfully gradates Malini’s response to her worsening situation from trust that she will find support to distress when she finds none to utter panic. Roy’s performance could serve as a model to other actors of how to play a character in extremis for almost an entire play.
Sanjay Talwar has one of his rare chances to play comedy, a genre at which he is so adept. He brings out all the nerdish awkwardness of Ramesh along with the forlorn hope that Malini might sometime begin to look on him as a potential husband. The fact that he, like everyone else, has downloaded Deepa’s sex video should raise more questions than the playwright deals with, but it’s still a strange over-reaction for Sharan to type the bumbling man immediately as a pedophile.
The other cast members make strong impressions in their brief appearances. One of Chandrasekhar’s most unusual tactics is never to allow Deepa herself to appear. Partially, this is because the playwright is interested in exploring the reactions to the video, not in those who made it. Partially, this is to keep the daughter a blank that we can fill in with any young person whose reputation would be similarly destroyed.
It’s a sign of how widespread mobile technology has become that a playwright from India should hit upon the hot-button subject of the negative effect of ill-considered internet postings before playwrights from the West. Throughout the action I kept wondering how different reactions would be to such an occurrence in Canada. Certainly the reactions would not be much different if the young woman were from any close-knit community. Chandrasekhar’s play will likely speak to the fears of many parents today. Since young people’s impulsive disregard for their own privacy continues apace, it is a fear without resolution though this is no excuse for Chandrasekhar not to have devised a satisfactory one for her play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Anusree Roy and Ash Knight; Anusree Roy and Andrew Lawrie. ©2014 John Lauener.
For tickets, visit www.nightwoodtheatre.net.
2014-01-31
Free Outgoing