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by Anusree Roy, directed by Thomas Morgan Jones

Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto

February 6–21, 2026

Chaya: “Open up the door! How can you close the door on a mother? Give her back to me”

There is a Latin proverb that reads mors tua, vita mea (literally, “your death, my life”). Such an approach to interpersonal relations sits far from the fraternal, love-thy-neighbour rhetoric to which we are accustomed. It follows a logic of utilitarianism and opportunism, precisely the survival code that animates Anusree Roy’s Through the Eyes of God.

Roy returns to Theatre Passe Muraille with a sequel to the play that marked her debut in 2007, the award-winning solo Pyaasa. That earlier work followed Chaya, an eleven-year-old child of the urban working poor, living with her family under a bridge. In Through the Eyes of God, she reappears in her early twenties, a mother left to provide alone after her husband’s death and her family’s decision to cast her out. This already fragile equilibrium is shattered when she learns that her eleven-year-old daughter has been kidnapped. Taken to Delhi by a man named Bubba, the child has been deliberately disfigured so that she will bring in more money through begging. Chaya exhausts every resource at her disposal to find her. She flies from Kolkata to Delhi, sells her possessions, bribes policemen; she even offers to join her daughter in confinement. Everything is negotiable in the face of a single imperative: reunion. As Chaya says, “She is all I have”.

Sole performer on stage, Gabriella Sundar Singh carries the entire dramaturgical architecture of the piece. Her performance is marked by sharpness and rhythmic control, articulating multiple characters through a precise economy of physical detail. Each role is coded through small, recognizable gestures, such as pushing her tongue to her nose to signify a child met on a Delhi street, or the muzzy expression of a Delhi street cook. For Chaya, Sundar Singh develops a corporeal grammar of survival: eyes are bulging from their sockets, the body perpetually pitched forward, as if ready to spring at any moment.

As if the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace’s 11x13-foot room were not restrictive enough, director Thomas Morgan Jones confines the actress to a narrow pedestal. The entire text is delivered from this compressed position, creating a sustained strain on the performer. The result is a heightened state of perceptual alertness, in which the audience bears witness to every shift of breath, gesture, and vocal inflection.

The production’s sound and lighting design actively extend its perceptual field. Lighting designer David DeGrow constructs space poetically, using sand-coloured yellow light whose rhythmic fluctuations create a pulsating effect, like a heart straining under exertion. Romeo Candido’s sound design functions as an ecosystem of noise and low frequencies, sustaining an undercurrent of unease even as the narrative shifts into moments of apparent respite. This sensory intensity is framed within Jawon Kang’s stark design: cold metal rails laid transversely across the space, evoking an Escher-like disorientation and a persistent sense of entrapment.

At its core, Through the Eyes of God is a brutal examination of corruption as an operating principle. In her search for Bubba, Chaya is forced to confront the fact that he is shielded by a rigid caste system, one that protects higher caste perpetrators while rendering the vulnerable disposable. The title itself acquires a bitter irony: Chaya can only appeal to the eyes of God, because those of the people around her refuse to see her at all. Every relationship is mediated by cash, every moral hesitation overridden by economic necessity.

The piece is unflinching and unapologetically bitter. As the narrative unfolds, Chaya is forced to confront a devastating truth: survival requires bending to the system, silencing her own moral framework, and participating in its violence.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Gabriella Sundar Singh in Through the Eyes of God. © 2026 Jae Yang.

For tickets visit: www.passemuraille.ca.