✭✭✭✭✩/✭✭✭✭✩

by Zaiba Baig, directed by Tawiah Ben M’Carthy

House of Beida & Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander Street, Toronto

April 2–18, 2026

“I wanna feel true connections” (Sakeena in Jhooti)

House of Beida and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre are presenting the world premiere of Zaiba Baig’s two new plays as a double-bill subtitled The Begging Brown Bitch Plays. The plays offer a revealing glimpse into the compositional voice of Baig, best-known for the play Acha Bacha (2018) and as the writer and star of the television series Sort Of (2021–24). Both plays carry Hindi titles. Both centre on a brown trans woman protagonist. Both wrestle with marginalization, repression and the difficulty of navigating the multiplicity and instability of reality itself.

Director Tawiah Ben M’Carthy and set designer Rachel Forbes further reinforce the kinship between the two works through a shared corner-stage configuration. The audience sits along two adjacent sides in an L-shape, while the remaining space becomes the performance arena. The arrangement allows the audience radically different vantage points. In fact, if there is a central thread uniting the two pieces, it lies precisely in this negotiation between the individual and reality, that unstable in-between space we call truth. Truth is never objective but constructed — the fragile result of a personal attempt to make sense of experience. Despite these shared foundations, the two works ultimately develop distinct aesthetic and dramaturgical identities.

Kainchee Lagaa

Kainchee Lagaa, which roughly translates from Hindi (कैंची लगा) as “the cut of the scissors”, follows two figures shaped by several forms of severance: physical, geographical, familial. On one side in Lahore is Billo (Angel Glady), a playful Pakistani transgender sex worker and defiantly hedonistic presence, marked by a recurring craving for tandoori chicken. On the other side in Etobicoke is her brother Arsalan (Praneet Akilla), who moved to Canada with their grandmother when they were young. Completing the stage picture is a figure found in ancient Greek drama, a κωφὸν πρόσωπον (a silent onstage character) played by the actor Xina, a mute figure who shifts fluidly between roles — sexual client, airport officer, ghost from the past.

Director Tawiah Ben M’Carthy organizes the space across two parallel planes. On the ground level, an imagined Pakistan emerges: Billo’s bedroom, complete with a charpai, a small vanity desk, poles of varying heights and, at the back, a raised square of brown tiles representing a squat toilet. Meanwhile, the surrounding upper corridors function as a separate, almost suspended dimension where Arsalan moves.

The vertical staging carries a social charge. Arsalan occupies the upper level as the family member who escaped to the West and carved out a different future, leaving behind what remains below — life in Pakistan. Yet Baig is too sharp to offer such a salvific vision of Western mobility. Arsalan is marked by survivor’s guilt and haunted by memories he cannot fully reconstruct. This displacement finds both comic and revealing expression in a scene where he gets lost in the village streets aboard a pedicab decked out in exuberant floral decorations.

This backward journey through memory and roots (by now a familiar topos in contemporary Canadian drama) is marked by an invigorating disorientation for the spectator. Baig’s writing is taut and mercurial, slipping between dreamlike atmospheres and deliberately crude, provocative registers. Arsalan’s speech unfolds in swirling, fragmentary rants, whereas Billo’s focus on pleasure seems rooted in a quiet rejection of reality. Both actors deliver convincing, profoundly human characterizations. Glady leans into sensuality and irreverence, winning the audience’s complicity. Akilla, instead, fires off rap-rhythmic streams of consciousness that at times grow so tense and rapid they become difficult to follow yet ultimately convey the character’s inner torment.

As themes of incest and sexual abuse gradually surface, a more complex picture of the siblings’ relationship emerges, revealing tangled layers of guilt. Through its macabre, expressionist choices, the work gestures toward the uneasy bond with a place of belonging that has hurt them, even unintentionally. We may leave these roots behind and attempt to forget them, yet they remain part of us, impossible to fully reject.

Jhooti

Following a 15-minute break, during which the stage crew dismantles the previous set, leaving behind only four columns of varying heights arranged diagonally across the space, the second piece begins. Jhooti (झूठी, Hindi for “a female liar”) features Zaiba Baig herself as the sole presence on stage.

The show unfolds in two distinct sections. The first assembles the existential whirlwind of Sakeena, a young Pakistani trans woman who works in a North American garment factory and decides to run away from home. The sequence opens with Sakeena fleeing, driven by pulsating music that pushes her into stylized, almost compulsive gestures. In her hands, she carries a plastic bag, a makeshift suitcase filled with clothes, lotions and miniskirts.

Her story emerges piece by piece, through a series of rambling soliloquies. Here too, the fourth wall collapses, and the audience becomes the repository of her story, a mediator to whom the character turns for support and protection. (“Are you here to protect me?” she asks.) The rhythm is chaotic but driven by a tight structure punctuated by Bollywood-like dance breaks, including a sudden Flashdance-style rain sequence.

But just as the audience settles into this theatrical pact, Baig breaks it, ushering in the show’s second section. Refusing to continue the fiction, the performer steps out of character, drops the Hindi accent, and chooses to narrate, rather than perform, the story of this woman, now revealed to have been shaped by sexual violence.

This shift unsettles the audience’s trust, placing the very notion of truth into question. What follows is a darkly comic sequence in which the performer introduces a series of premises, only to immediately contradict them. Baig proves particularly compelling: her tentative, fragile performance of Sakeena initially raises doubts, but ultimately emerges as a calculated choice that heightens the impact of her later rupture of reality. Each apparent truth Baig introduces feels paradoxically honest — “I’m not trans,” Baig declares, prompting an eruption of laughter — sharpening the work’s irony.

The work invites multiple political readings: from violence embraced as a masochistic means of affirming one’s existence, to transphobia whose other side often manifests as patronizing compassion. Yet beyond these interpretations, what ultimately stands out is Baig’s reflection on performativity and the spectator’s pact.

While contemporary theatre often seeks to dissolve the boundary between actor and audience in pursuit of authenticity, Baig’s work complicates this premise. Rather than building trust, she weaponizes uncertainty, asking how much inauthenticity audiences are willing to passively absorb. It urges us to question everything we are presented with, calling for a moment of critical awakening. The result is a disorientation with unmistakably Brechtian echoes, continually destabilizing the reliability of what we are being told.

Both Kainchee Lagaa and Jhooti ultimately leave us with a reflection on complexity. In an era of easy narratives and quick conclusions, Baig asks us to sit with ambiguity. What if reality were more complex than we are willing to admit? What if reality resisted understanding altogether?

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photos: Zaiba Baig as Sakeena in Jhooti; Angel Glady as Billo in Kainchee Lagaa; Praneet Akilla as Arsalan in Kainchee Lagaa; Zaiba Baig as Sakeena in Jhooti © 2026 Jeremy Mimnagh.

For tickets visit: buddiesinbadtimes.com.