Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Bilal Baig, directed by Brendan Healy
Theatre Passe Muraille & Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille Extra Space, Toronto
February 6-18, 2018
Zaya: “Am I a good child?”
The prime value of Bilal Baig’s first play Acha Bacha is that it gives a general audience a rare chance to see a depiction of a gay relationship between Muslim Ontarians on stage. What Baig shows, intentionally or not, is that such a relationship is no different from any gay relationship where one partner is out and the other is not. Otherwise, it’s hard to know what story Baig is trying to tell with these characters. The main character may be confused about his life but that doesn’t mean the play itself should be confusing.
The play opens provocatively with Salim (Matt Nethersole) performing simulated fellatio on Zaya (Qasim Khan). The couple has been together for some time, but tonight Salim leaves on a trip and will be away for seven weeks, the longest separation the two have yet had to endure. Therefore, they vow to devote this last day completely to each other. Yet, for unknown reasons, Zaya is distracted and can’t fully enjoy passive or active fellatio. Before the two can examine why this is, Zaya receives a phone call that his mother has fallen in her home and is now in hospital. He now has to visit her there at least until his sister can arrive.
Salim, dressed in bangles and necklaces and with painted nails, wants to come with Zaya, but Zaya does not think this the right time either to come out to his mother (Ellora Patnaik) or to introduce Salim as his partner. But Salim comes anyway
Alternating with scenes about Zaya and Selim and Zaya’s mother’s recovery are scenes set 20 years in the past when Zaya was only eight. Zaya used to go to a masjid (“prayer room” or “mosque”) run by Maulana (Omar Alex Khan), the father of Zaya’s boyhood friend Mubeen (Shelly Antony). The masjid in the basement of Maulana’s home also served as a madrasa (“religious school”), where Maulana taught the few Muslim boys in the area about prayer and religion.
At that time the other boys, Mubeen included, resented that fact that Maulana would pay Zaya so much attention. At the same time Zaya and Mubeen indulged in some secret sexual experimentation. How seriously either took this experimentation Baig keeps unclear although he does suggest that it meant much more to Mubeen than Mubeen ever admits.
What preoccupies Zaya, for reasons that Baig never makes known, is why after an Eid party 20 years ago, Maulana and his family moved from Mississauga to Kitchener, where Maulana set up another masjid. The implication of these flashbacks heading ever deeper into the past is that something happened involving Zaya and Maulana to cause the move.
All this leads to a conclusion that is unsatisfactory because it seems both confusing and unjustifiable. Along the way Baig has also inserted what may or may not be a dream sequence involving a suddenly street-talking Mubeen, who, for totally unknown reasons, wants to humiliate Zaya and then have Zaya strike him. Usually, a character’s investigation of the past somehow illuminates the present. Here, however, given that Zaya’s recovered memories of the past take up at least half of the play, we end with a situation where half of what Baig has shown in the past seems have to have nothing to do with the the other half in the present.
What makes the play watchable are the fine performances of the entire cast. Qasim Khan is very sympathetic as Zaya and can easily and believably shift between the confused Zaya at age 28 and the innocent Zaya at age 8. A habit of Baig’s exposition leaves Zaya in the dark about a large number of events past and present. A character will tell Zaya the information to which he exclaims “What!?” and nothing more. It would be good if Khan could vary all these exclamations but it would be better if Baig had not written them.
Matt Nethersole is also sympathetic as the genderqueer Selim, although Baig has not avoided seeing in Selim the clichéd model of the wise drag queen, i.e. outsiders may think Selim is mixed up because he wears women’s clothes, but in fact he’s the moral centre of the play. While Zaya is trapped in recriminatory arguments with his mother, Selim goes out and gets practical things done for her. Nethersole has the poise and timing to make Selim both smart and funny. But Baig’s twist of an ending really doesn’t fit the understanding character Nethersole has shown Selim to be.
Omar Alex Khan is excellent as Maulana, whose kindliness he lends an ever so slight ambiguity. Shelly Antony plays Mubeen as a guy who likes to project an imperturbably façade, yet Antony subtly hints that Mubeen is not so unaffected by things as he pretends to be. Ellora Patnaik has a fine role as Zaya’s mother and proves that Islamic mothers can heap guilt on their children in their own particular way as well as proverbial Jewish mothers can.
Baig uses passages of untranslated Urdu to give the play an air of authenticity, but it does mean we don’t always know what the characters are talking about. To help people learn about the Islamic world I fully expected there to be a glossary of terms in the programme, but there is none. Even the title is not translated. As it turns out “Acha bacha” means “good child” in Urdu, and that is what Zaya apparently strives to be.
More disturbing is that Baig gives us no clue as to how homosexual relations are viewed by Islam. Zaya’s mother says that Zaya does “bad things”, but what we need to know, especially since Selim is more devout than Zaya, is how “bad” these things are supposed to be. As we know, in some Islamic countries, like Saudi Arabia, homosexual acts carry the death penalty, where in others, like Jordan, they are legal. Scholars of the Qur’an differ widely on whether the book supports or condemns such acts. Homosexuality was decriminalized in the Ottoman Empire in 1858, 109 years before it was in Great Britain. In some British colonies like Pakistan it was criminalized when Britons drew up local penal codes. And, besides all of this, different branches of Islam view homosexuality differently.
Therefore, if Baig wants us to understand how religion impacts the relationship of Zaya and Selim, he has to give us more information about their religious and family backgrounds. How else can we judge how “bad” Zaya thinks himself to be or why Selim is so easily genderqueer and devout? While it is good to see gay Muslim characters on stage, it would be better if Baig told their story more clearly and gave it more context.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Matt Nethersole and Qasim Khan; Matt Nethersole and Qasim Khan. ©2018 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.
2018-02-07
Acha Bacha