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<b>by Kawa Ada, directed by Nina Lee Aquino
Cahoots Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
March 5-23, 2014
</b>
“Disaster in Afghanistan – and Canada”
Much as one has admired Kawa Ada as an actor over the years, one has to admit that his first play <i>The Wanderers</i>, now having its world premiere at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, is a disaster. Publicity for the plays promises “a rare Afghan-Canadian perspective” on the world, but the play seems to do no such thing despite that fact that Ada is an Afghan-Canadian. The play is conceived so much as fantasy that any historical or sociopolitical specificity is left behind, and, unlike the best fantasy literature, the story itself is incoherent.
The play begins well enough. To reach its seats the audience has to pass on either side of Camellia Koo’s atmospheric set of a ruined, sand-covered heptagonal pavilion that represents a structure in a central park in Kabul. There in Part 1 set in Kabul in 1978, actor Dalal Badr emerges playing the role of 14-year-old Mariam, who addresses an unseen 14-year-old schoolboy Aman. She chides Aman for the daring he has shown in kissing her and tells him her strange story.
When her mother was pregnant with her, she was stung by a scorpion. Her mother might have died except that a gypsy woman saved her life by sucking out all the venom. In fairy-tale-like fashion, Mariam’s mother asks what she can do to repay the gypsy, who tells her that the child she is carrying now belongs to the gypsies, known as “Wanderers” in Afghanistan (similar to their appellation as “Travellers” in Britain). The gypsy woman predicts that the child who will be called Roshan meaning “light” will be a messiah who will have the power to unite all the Mohammedan peoples.
After this long monologue, Ada shifts the scene to Part 2 set in Toronto in 1985 where Aman (played by Ada), visits his employer Joseph (Omar Alex Khan). This is when the inconsistencies and illogicalities start to mount. As we discover Aman and Mariam have married and moved to Toronto. Even though Mariam has nearly died giving birth to Roshan the night before and even though Joseph is not expecting him and there is nothing for him to do, Aman goes into work. Joseph doesn’t feel like seeing him anyway because his wife coincidentally left him that very day because, as he implies, she discovered he is gay.
This all smells like an artificial situation created to get two characters to exchange information. What is worse, Ada introduces Joseph’s daughter, Alice (also played by Badr), who suffers from congenital analgesia. This is an extraordinarily rare condition where pain signals are prevented from reaching the brain so that the child is insensitive to pain. The result is that such people are in constant danger of accidentally harming themselves because they can’t feel the pain that would signal a broken bone, a bitten tongue or a scratched cornea. That’s the reason why Ada first presents Alice as wearing plastic goggles and oven mitts, meant to prevent her from accidentally biting too hard on her fingers or hurting her eyes.
Unfortunately, Ada has also made Alice developmentally delayed with a tendency to self-harm, a combination too contradictory to exist in nature. People with congenital analgesia would have no inclination to self-harm deliberately since they cannot feel the stimulus of pain which is exactly what self-harming children seek. Ada has given Alice these contradictory medical conditions because he wants, for completely unknown reason, to have a character at age 14 pluck out her own eyes. Ada’s research about removing eyeballs seems to have been confined to viewing Uma Thurman’s character attack Daryl Hannah’s in <i>Kill Bill, Vol. 1</i>. Sorry, but it’s not as easy as Tarantino makes it look. Self-harmers may damage the eye but actually to enucleate the eyeball intact from its socket without pulling out the optic nerve and attached muscles, as Alice does, requires the expertise and tools of a surgeon. Ada wants to present us the image of a girl holding a glass of ice with her two bloody ping-pong ball-like eyes in it and is ready to defy all logic to do so.
Even more bizarre is the fact that Alice never appears again and has no effect on the story. If like Sophocles in <i>Oedipus</i> or Shakespeare in <i>King Lear</i>, Ada had established a symbolism of blindness and insight the act could somehow be made relevant. But since Ada has neglected to do this, the scene comes off as a shock disconnected from the surrounding narrative.
Act 1 is not over until Ada indulges in more craziness. Part 3 set in Toronto in 2013 finds the grown-up Roshan (also played by Ada) in a dispute with Marie (Melanie Jantzen), the low-class owner of a laundromat in Scarborough. After a protracted, pointless argument, it finally transpires that Roshan has tracked down Marie as the woman with whom his father, Aman, now a cab driver but still married to Mariam, is having an affair. Roshan insists he is not bisexual but rather a gay guy who sometimes sleeps with women. In a manner that strains credulity, the violent argument between Roshan and Marie turns into his flirting with her and her encouraging the flirtation. This soon enough escalates to sex behind a broken wall of the Kabul set which has remained on stage for both scenes in Toronto. For unknown reasons, the scene ends with Roshan leaving all his belongs behind and rushing out into traffic to kill himself.
Part 4, which begins Act 2, is set in Kabul in 2014 and begins with a long monologue by Roshan, who apparently did not kill himself and has, for unknown reasons, travelled to Kabul to have gay sex even though there it is punishable by imprisonment or death. Then Aman (now played by Khan) enters the scene. Why Aman is in Kabul is as much a mystery as why Roshan is there. When Roshan and Aman finally recognize each other, Roshan decides to flout the prophecies the gypsies made by flaunting his gayness before his father. This action, of course assumes, that gayness disqualifies him as an achiever of great things, but why it should lead to Roshan masturbating in front of his father is yet another unmotivated shock tactic.
Despite this, however, since Roshan discovers a book by Tennessee Williams in his father’s luggage, he asks to have his father hold him as Williams wished when he died. And thus the naked Roshan dies or falls asleep in his father’s arms. It is not clear what happens or why Aman would consent to Roshan’s demand after his son’s earlier outrageous behaviour. What is clear is that whatever has happened to Roshan has more to do with Tennessee Williams than with either Afghanistan or Canada.
The play closes with the excruciatingly long monologue of Marie in Sudbury in 2014 who is nine months pregnant. Director Nina lee Aquino decides to create a parallel between Mariam in Part 1 and Marie in Part 5 by having the woman, fearful she will break water at any moment, jog several times around the Kabul set which is still in place.
I describe the plot in detail simply because it is such a series of unbelievable events. If it all has some symbolic or mythic meaning, Ada has failed to make it clear. The play says nothing about Afghanistan except that it has a history of defeating all foreign attempts to conquer it. Ada’s view expressed via Roshan, is that the foreign invasions have in fact helped prevent the Afghans from destroying each other. The “Wanderers” of Ada’s title are identified only as “gypsies”. If Ada had wanted to comment on his native country he could have identified them with the stigmatized, itinerant people of the country that Afghans call Jats – but he does not do this. If he wanted to explore homosexuality in Afghanistan, he could have mentioned the hypocrisy of a culture that tacitly allows the forced prostitution of boys for adult males but outlaws gay sex between two adults – but again he does not.
Though well acted, except for the embarrassingly strident Jantzen, the play amounts to two-and-a-half hours of wasted time. For all the talented people involved, it involved far more wasted time and effort. Before this mess moved from page to stage did no one, –not the dramaturge, the producer or the director – tell Ada, “Sorry, this doesn’t work. This makes no sense”? Or did they do so and Ada ignored them? If so, the responsibility for this disaster is entirely his own.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Kawa Ada as Aman and Dalal Badr as Alice; Omar Alex Khan as Aman and Kawa Ada as Roshan. ©2014 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.cahoots.ca">www.cahoots.ca</a>.
<b>2014-03-08</b>
<b>The Wanderers</b>