Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✩✩✩
by Suvendrini Lena, directed by Marjorie Chan
Cahoots Theatre with Factory Theatre, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
November 10-27, 2016
Kavalan: “Love has nothing to do with survival”
Suvendrini Lena’s first play The Enchanted Loom has an unusual origin. It was written in place of a conventional research project as part of her residency training in neurology at the University of Toronto. Lena’s specialty is trauma-induced epilepsy and that is exactly what her play depicts. It is also about the lives of a Sri Lankan family who has escaped to Canada leaving one of their two sons behind and the unhealed wound that that action has caused. The problem is that the play’s academic and scientific origins are still too visible. Lena spends almost as much time discussing trauma-induced epilepsy and its possible surgical treatment in very technical terms as she does depicting the life of the family. For the ordinary playgoing audience only the latter will be of interest.
Lena presents us with a four-member Tamil family who has escaped the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009) which, at the time, is still ongoing. Thangan (Sam Kalilieh), the father, was a journalist covering the Sri Lankan civil war when he was captured, imprisoned and tortured. Concussions he received during beatings have led to the onset of epileptic seizures and general psychosis. His disability has become so bad he can no longer work and the family must live on what his wife Sevi (Zorana Sadiq) earns. Their son Kanan (Kawa Ada) has a scholarship to do animal research study in epilepsy. Their young daughter Kavitha (Asha Vijayasingham) is Thangan’s chief comfort at home.
One day Kavitha discovers a pair of dance anklets under the sink, a discovery that pleases Thangan but angers Sevi. The same day at a Tamil march, a protester grabs Kanan and addresses him as Kavalan, his brother’s name. This convinces Kanan that contrary to the family’s belief Kavalan is still alive.
Meanwhile, Thangan who thinks he sees and hears Kavalan, has refused to see the psychiatrist assigned to him because he does want to take pills. Instead, he is willing to undergo neurosurgery to remove the lesions on the temporal lobe of his brain in hopes of removing the memories of Kavalan that are so painful.
Lena commits various errors one finds in first-time playwrights. First of all, she doesn’t sufficiently establish the setting or nature of the characters. Not until near the end of Act 1 do we realize that the action does not take place in Sri Lanka but in Canada. Not until Act 2 do we realize that Kavalan, who has been called Kanan’s “elder brother” is actually his twin brother. The adult actor Vijayasingham is playing Kavitha as a child, but we have no idea how old she is supposed to be.
There are also a number of improbabilities. We can understand that Kanan would want to find a brother who may now be alive, but he wants to travel to Sri Lanka during the Civil War when government troops are unrestrainedly killing Tamils and, even more unlikely, he wants to travel just when his father is about to have life-changing surgery. As for Thangan, who would choose to have potentially life-threatening brain surgery without first trying medication to manage his symptoms? In fact, it is questionable a neurosurgeon would operate on a patient who had not previously tried the medical course prescribed to him.
Lena is so intent on portraying surgery as a cure for certain types of epilepsy she feels she has to give the audience a crash course in neurology during the action via the doctors’ discussions. If this were a play originally written for a lay audience, it would be sufficient to know that Thangan needs to have brain surgery without knowing the details. Since, however, Lena was writing for a specialist audience her dialogue is overwhelmed with medical terminology that will alienate anyone interested in the family drama.
Not only that, Lena has given Thangan an unnecessarily complex diagnosis. We first learn that he has diffuse brain injury as the result of multiple beatings. Then we find that as a result of that trauma Thangan’s has temporal lobe epilepsy which is responsible for his psychosis and overwhelming feelings of fear. Confusing matters further, Lena also gives Thangan a stroke in his frontal lobe which has weakened the left side of his body. This leads to a discussion of a combined operation to remove the temporal lobe as a treatment for his psychosis and removal of the motor cortex controlling his left arm to reduce his pain. Removing the temporal lobe can effect memory and nonverbal communication, something one should think a former writer and poet like Thangan would not wish.
When Lena portrays Thangan’s discussions with the doctors and his family, she has him discuss these three aspects of brain damage all at once which makes it extremely hard to parse what his priorities and the doctors’ should be. For the purpose of telling her story clearly, Lena should omit the lengthy discussions of Thangan’s diffuse brain injury and his stroke as unnecessary. The scene where the neurologist (Beatriz Pizano) talks the neurosurgeon (Peter Bailey) into an operation he is clearly unwilling to perform seems improbable. Later, and even more improbably Lena has the neurologist and neurosurgeon argue about what type of surgery to undertake in front of the family, something the doctors should step away from the family to do to avoid undermining the families’ confidence.
Lena’s play is most successful when it focusses on the tensions within the family and the helplessness they feel in watching a war play out in their former homeland. This would be subject enough for drama without bringing in a complex medical problem. Obviously, writing about the neurological problem was the original raison d’être of the play when it was a medical project. But for a lay audience, Lena should let that go to focus on what they can understand without reams of explanation.
It is not surprising that the three most effective scenes of the play have nothing to do with Thangan’s illness. The first is Sevi teaching Kavitha to do a traditional dance. The second is Sevi’s narration of what really happened when Thangan was release from prison. The third is Thangan’s memory of encountering Kavalan and discovering his son’s true nature. These scenes show that Lena has a gift for creating engaging drama. It’s just too bad that for its Factory Theatre presentation, she was not able to revise the work to emphasize the throes of the Tamil family rather than the details of Thangan’s medical condition.
Even given the flawed nature of the play, two performances especially stand out. Zorana Sadiq gives the subtlest performance of the cast. She lends Sevi an intonation of voice and furtiveness of gesture that suggests Sevi has a painful secret that she is hiding. Kawa Ada plays both Kanan and Kavalan and makes a clear distinction between them. While his Kannan shows a more generalized concern for events involving his family, his Kavalan is frighteningly fierce and filled with rage.
Sam Kalilieh is most effective in depicting Thangan when he is most distressed. When Thangan is not under duress, Khalilieh makes him so rational and at ease that his desire for surgery without first trying medication seems even more unbelievable. The role of Kavitha is written as a rather generic child who is inquisitive and emotionally labile, and Asha Vijayasingham does what she can to give the character some measure of individuality.
Lena uses the neurologist and the neurosurgeon primarily as conduits for scientific and medical exposition. Beatriz Pizano and Peter Bailey portray these characters as empathetic and sincerely concerned but it is still difficult for them to make the tongue-twisting polysyllabic medicalese that overloads their speeches sound at all natural.
Director Marjorie Chan makes full use of the abstract white set by Joanna Yu that takes on different moods under the lighting of Arun Srinivasan. Chan’s stylized rendering of Thangan’s surgery and of Thangan’s encounter with Kavalan are especially effective.
Nevertheless, The Enchanted Loom (a reference to Charles Scott Sherrington’s description of the brain) needs a great deal more revision before it is ready to appeal to a general audience. Lena has to take the difficult step of excising all the neurological description that was initially central to the play in order to focus more on the family, their relations with each other and their coming to terms with the loss of their side in the country that was once their home.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Beatriz Pizano, Asha Vijayasingham, Peter Bailey, Sam Khalilieh (on table) and Zorana Sadiq; Kawa Ada, Zorana Sadiq, Sam Khalilieh (on floor) and Asha Vijayasingham; Kawa Ada. ©2016 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2016-11-13
The Enchanted Loom