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by Anusree Roy, directed by Nina Lee Aquino

Crow’s Theatre & the National Arts Centre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

March 7-30, 2025;

National Arts Centre, Ottawa

April 2-12, 2025

Alo: “We go to a new land”

On midnight of August 14, 1947, Britain portioned India into two countries – India and Pakistan – India for Hindus and Pakistan for Muslims. The division according to religion caused the displacement of between 12 and 20 million people. Anusree Roy’s play Trident Moon, now receiving its Canadian premiere, shows the effect of the partition on ordinary people, in this case Hindu women who are fleeing the recently separate Pakistan for a safe haven in India. The play depicts a harrowing journey crammed with incident. The problem is that Roy has crammed the 100-minute-long play so full of incident that she leaves little room for an exploration of her characters.

The action is set entirely in the back of a truck speeding from Pakistan to India. Designer Jawon Kang as represented the space as a long trapezoidal thrust leading to two metal doors upstage that stand for the only entrance into the back of the truck. This thrust does not extend into the audience but is flanked on each side by amorphous black debris, symbolizing ashes perhaps, and the door is surrounded by grey curtains that descend to the debris. Curiously, though, the fact that the thrust is open on three sides does not convey an appropriate atmosphere of claustrophobia.

At the start of the play there are six women on stage – three Hindus and three Muslims. Lighting designer Michelle Ramsay has symbolically separated the two with a streak of yellow light. Stage right are the Hindu women in yellowish saris. Stage left are the Muslim women in greenish saris. The notion that there is a division between the two groups could not be made more visually obvious.

The Hindu women are Alo, her sister Bani, who is suffering from a gunshot wound, and Bani’s daughter Arun, whom the others refer to as “retarded”. The Muslim women are Rabia, Pari and the girl Heera, who is Arun’s age. Alo’s brother Kumar, whom we never meet, is driving the truck. What is most noticeable is that the Muslim women have their hands tied behind their backs while the Hindu women do not.

Clearly, women divided by religion travelling to India is not the only story Roy intends to tell. There is a mystery that explains the situation that Roy elucidates piecemeal as the action progresses. Unfortunately, Roy does not establish the form of the play as a mystery so that we are not even curious why half the women are bound and half not. Besides this, Roy and sound designer Romeo Candido’s often overloud soundscape have so emphasized that the women are travelling through a chaos of gunfire and bombs that the set-up on the truck simply seems to reflect the chaos outside it.

As it turns out, the journey the women are making is Alo’s idea. Alo and her sister were servants of the two adult Muslim women. When the Partition is declared, Pari’s husband wanted to get rid of any evidence that they as Muslims had associated with Hindus. He therefore killed Alo’s husband and her two sons. In revenge, Alo has kidnapped Pari and the other two Muslim women with the intent of taking them to Hindu India.

Why precisely Alo has chosen this plan remains unclear. Why not punish the Muslim women by leaving them servantless and simply flee to safety in India without them? Or, if quid pro quo revenge is the point, why not kill the women in Pakistan and then flee?

As in a mystery, Roy saves a major plot point to be revealed only near the very end. In the debates between the Hindus and Muslims, Alo comes close to telling us in full what led to the present situation, but Roy has arranged for the truck to stop three times, thus postponing any such revelation. At the first stop, Kumar picks up Sonali, a pregnant Sikh woman, thus allowing Roy to represent the three major religious groups in the area. At the second stop, Kumar, who must be far less prejudiced than his sister, picks up an old woman in a burqa and a mute, crippled girl she says is her daughter. The actual religion of the old woman and the real state of the girl’s disability become the major focus of the play, making us nearly forget the supposed main plot of Alo’s revenge.

The third time Kumar is forced to stop the truck by robbers. A shirtless boy enters and it remains unknown whether he is Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. His sole goal is to rob the women of the gold he assumes they have with them. The women do have gold with them but whether they can conceal this fact from the young man who carries out an invasive search of all nine women leads to the tensest and most unnecessarily prolonged section of the play. In similar situations in plays and films, the antagonist randomly selects one or two subjects for humiliation rather personally violating everyone.

The arrival of the young man, ironically named Lovely, is a turning point in the action. After his departure the women realize that their previous struggle of Hindu versus Muslim pales in comparison to the struggle of women in general versus men. At the start of the play, Alo wonders how the British could simply draw a line on a map and tell people that Hindus should live on one side, Muslims on the other. After the boy leaves, Roy could have usefully linked the women’s oppression by men to South Asian people’s oppression by Europeans, but she leaves that conclusion for the audience to draw for themselves.

One of Roy’s best ideas for illustrating the women’s situation is her showing how easily the Hindu and Muslim girls get along with the daughter of the old woman in the burqa. Their play suggests without any gloss how people’s prejudice against people of other religions is learned rather than innate.

The difficulty with the play is that by withholding the true relation of the women until Alo’s revelation at the end, we don’t really know how to evaluate what any character says. Besides that, Roy has packed the action with so much incident and so many distractions that she is able to depict the characters only in the broadest strokes, much less to depict character development.

Roy accords only four of the play’s ten characters any complexity. Roy herself plays Alo, who for the majority of the action merely shouts commands and insults and becomes the least likeable of the woman. There are other factors feeding into Alo’s seemingly perpetual anger, but Roy the playwright and the actor does not allow is to see these until near the conclusion. There Roy shows us Alo from a completely different, much more complicated point of view, and we may well wonder whether the play would have been stronger if we had known Alo’s secret earlier.

Zorana Sadiq provides welcome comic relief as Sonali, the pregnant Sikh woman. Sidiq makes Sonali’s habitual garrulousness an amusing counterpoint to the unending arguments that preceded her arrival. Similarly, Sadiq’s emphasis on Sonali’s inherent kindness contrasts well with the vitriol hurled by the other women.

Afroza Banu manages to be both calming and enigmatic at the same time as Sumaiya, the older woman to claims to be a Hindu disguised as a Muslim. Banu strongly projects Sumaiya’s generosity, warmth and wisdom as a contrast to the automatic and virulent views of the Hindu and Muslim women she joins.

As Lovely, the would be robber, Mirza Sarhan, displays combination of awkwardness and bravado in youth. Sarhan shows Lovely as a threat but mostly dangerous because of his ineptitude and willingness to prove himself to the other (unseen) men, rather than because of any personal malice. Sarhan makes clear that Lovely is almost as embarrassed in performing his intimate search of the women as they are outraged by it.

Unfortunately, the other six members of the cast are allowed to sound only one or two notes. As the older muslin woman Rabia, Imali Perera’s best scene is when she takes a break from berating Alo to giving Lovely a complete dressing down until he is so ashamed of himself he has to leave. As Pari, the second oldest Muslim woman, Muhaddisah doesn’t have such a dramatic scene, and Prerna Nehta as Heera, young Muslim girl has little else to do except saying she needs to pee.

One can imagine that the deep-voiced Sehar Bhojani, who plays Bani, Alo’s sister, could give quite a formidable performance. Unfortunately, all Bani gets to do is moan, complain of her injury and remain inert for most of the play. As Bani’s daughter Arun, Sahiba Arora has little to do except to seem harmless and likeable. There is much more we would like to know about Munni, the crippled girl whom Sumaiya says is her daughter. Roy has Sumaiya give an account of Munni’s tragic past but it would be good to hear some of it from Munni herself. Then, at least, Michelle Mohammed, who plays Munni would have a more rewarding role.

The title Trident Moon combines the trident, symbol of Hinduism with the crescent moon, symbol of Islam. In the context of the play a man who rapes a woman would carve the symbol of faith on the woman’s hand so that she would be forever marked by the shame of the encounter. Trident Moon has the odd honour of having the longest list of audience warnings I have ever seen: “The play includes content that may be disturbing including depictions of death, as well as physical and sexual violence towards women and children… [It] also includes … simulated gunfire, strong language, discussions of rape, torture, murder, decapitation and derogatory language”.

The play feels as if Roy is trying in a single go to show or refer to all the possible atrocities that can occur during war. Roy’s strength, however, as shown in small-scale plays such as Pyaasa (2008) or Roshni (2010), is in creating indelibly memorable characters whose actions take on a wide range of significance. The size and busyness of a ten-person, incident-filled play like Trident Moon seems to thwart this kind of character development and thus leads to a work that does not involve us as much as it should.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Imali Perera (behind), Michelle Mohammed, Prerna Nehta, Zorana Sadiq (behind) Sahiba Arora, Sehar Bhojani (lying down), Anusree Roy, and Muhaddisah; Afroza Banu, Michelle Mohammed and Anusree Roy; Mirza Sarhan, Zorana Sadiq, Imali Perera, Afroza Banu, Muhaddisah, and Anusree Roy (front); Anusree Roy as Alo. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com or nac‑cna.ca.