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by Anita Majumdar, directed by Brian Quirt

Alberta Theatre Projects with Nightswimming, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto

February 18-March 8, 2014

“You need darkness to see the stars”

Anita Majumdar’s latest play Same Same But Different is in major need of an editor.  With a running time of two hours and forty minutes, the two-act play is at least forty minutes too long.  Shortening the play alone would not necessarily rid it of other problems such as the reasons for its two-act structure and its habit of iterating themes rather than exploring or developing them.  Majumdar is a fine actor and with an appealing stage presence, but the present work seems preoccupied with showcasing her considerable talents in dance and comedy rather than in creating a satisfying evening of theatre.

The show’s first act takes place in Vancouver in 2014, the second in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1987.  The first act focusses on Aisha (Majumdar), a spoiled Canadian actor of Indian descent who has broken into the world of Bollywood and is headlining a movie being filmed in Vancouver.  Aisha is doing a dance number with Ben (Nicco Lorenzo Garcia), and is asked by the unseen director (Reza Jacobs) to do numerous retakes.  As she becomes more flustered, she receives what she perceives as a final insult when he asks her to use a lightening cream on her skin.  He says he doesn’t want to recast the film but that she could stand to lose a few shades.          

Through the rest of the act Aisha and Ben rehearsal various numbers with and without the director who is called off set for rather too many improbable reasons.  During his absences we learn how Aisha’s mother always told her to avoid the sun and how Aisha has even done commercials for skin lightening creams.  Ben, half-Filipino, half-Spanish, has always been fascinated with Bollywood and has idolized Aisha from his youth.  Strangely enough, the Director is so impressed with Ben’s dancing ability that he promotes him from backup dancer to lead, much to Aisha’s consternation.  She had expected a man with Caucasian features to be her leading man, not someone she thinks looks “Chinese”.  Eventually, Aisha’s enmity toward Ben wanes and he suggests that she defy the Director’s orders to lighten her skin.

The act ends exactly as it began with the same dance number and the same retakes.  Normally, this would signal that the what we has seen in between was a series a flashbacks leading up to this point.  Director Brian Quirt has given us no such signal, so that the when the repetition of the beginning occurs we have no idea why or when it is happening.

Majumdar’s obvious subject is shadeism, or prejudice about degrees of colour within a racial group.  Only last month Acting Up Stage and Obsidian presented the Stephen Flaherty musical Once on This Island (1990) on the same topic among African descendants living in the Caribbean.  The musical was far more dynamic than Same Same and benefited from an inventive fairy-tale structure.  Same Same, about the trials of a petulant movie star heads more in the direction of soap opera.  While the main character of Once on This Island suffers terrible losses because of her darker colour, it is very difficult to work up much sympathy for Aisha since she has clearly succeeded despite Bollywood’s endemic shadeism.

In Act 2 we meet Aisha’s mother Kabira (Majumdar), four days before the arranged marriage that will take her from Bombay to Vancouver.  She is in a recording studio with Filipe (Garcia) – half-Filipino, half-Spanish, who has an Indian passport – to record two songs for an upcoming Bollywood film.  Kabira is under the impression that she is a lead singer, but Filipe knows they are both background singers whose voices will be altered out of all recognition.  The unseen Sound Engineer (Jacobs) alternately chides them and excuses himself from the sound booth with even less motivation than the Director of Act 1. 

The central irony of the act is that the two songs Kabira and Filipe sing are Hindi versions of “Beat It” and “Billy Jean” by Michael Jackson, a sign of a different kind of cultural colonialism, one that Majumdar does not explore.  Kabria and Filipe refer to Jackson’s skin disease of vitiligo that turned his dark skin white.  Kabrira says her mother wishes her daughter would catch the disease.  The problems with the allusion is that in 1987 Jackson’s skin was still relatively dark and not the powdered white of his later years and that Jackson didn’t mention he had the disease until 1993.  Kabira tells the Hindi-speaking Filipe that being Indian is a “virus” – “you can’t catch it, you’re born with it”.  The common cold is a virus, but people are not born with it and obviously do catch it.  These are just two of various slips that undermine our already weak interest in what seems to be an unnecessary half of the play.

Fortunately, both Majumdar and Garcia are dynamic performers.  The fantastic dance numbers in Act 1, all choreographed by Majumdar are the highlights of the show.  Majumdar is such an imaginative choreographer one wonders if she could have told her tale primarily through dance.  As an actor, Majumdar easily sets the haughty Aisha through voice and gesture apart from the repressed Kabira.  In contrast, Garcia and Reza do little to distinguish their four roles though this is primarily because the writing itself does not distinguish them.  While Garcia brings freshness to his two roles, Reza’s two are so tinged with satire it is impossible to take either of his characters seriously.

Majumdar has written successful one-act plays in the past like Fish Eyes of 2005 and The Misfit of 2008.  As an attempt to write two interconnected one-acters, Same Same just doesn’t work.  It is useful to make an audience aware of shadeism in Bollywood, but the subject can only become engaging if we see how the prejudice has negatively affected a person’s life.  Let’s hope Majumdar’s writing is back in form in her next show.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Anita Majumdar and Nicco Lorenzo Garcia; Anita Majumdar and Nicco Lorenzo Garcia. ©2014 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.passemuraille.on.ca.