Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
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by Anita Majumdar, directed by Mark Cassidy
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
October 25-November 15, 2008
The second offering in Theatre Passe Muraille’s “Festival of Four Plays” is the Toronto premiere of The Misfit by Anita Majumdar, second in a trilogy of one-woman plays begun with her acclaimed Fish Eyes in 2004. The play suffers from dual focus and from Majumdar’s tendency to explain the meaning of the action rather than let it speak for itself.
The play is an uneasy mixture of satire of the vulgarity of contemporary Indian wedding ceremonies and a scathing critique of the practice of “honour killings.” Naz, a young woman from British Columbia trained in Indian classical dance, has been disowned by her Canadian family after she falls in love with a would-be Punjabi singing star. She takes up with a dance troupe in India that performs at weddings, only nowadays the couples don’t want Indian classical music. Therefore, we see the bizarre spectacle of Naz performing classical moves to current hits by Beyoncé and Britney Spears. The other two members of the troupe, the high-strung Nikki and the slow-witted Su-su, also have sad backgrounds. Nikki’s husband left her and Su-su’s village made her marry the mango tree where inadvertently she lost her virginity. The troupe leader Gustakhi seems merely a comic figure until Nikki realizes that she has ordered an honour killing herself. If the plot has a serious intent it goes off the rails when Majumdar has Gustakhi plan to depediate a rival dance master for stealing the troupe’s dances.
As in Fish Eyes Majumdar creates an instant bond with the audience and she is a master at distinguishing the six characters she plays. Her dance interludes are so delightful one wishes they would either be longer or less fragmented. Why Naz is stuck in India doing a job she loathes rather than joining a classic dance troupe elsewhere, say in Canada, is never explained. The segue to the serious subject of honour killings after the satire that takes up most of the play seems forced. If honour killings is Majumdar’s real subject she should move into it sooner. Nothing is wrong with using Naz as a narrator, but the play would be stronger if Majumdar let us draw our own conclusions from what Naz observes. Nevertheless, South Asian women will be glad that Majumdar has raised a taboo topic in this play and non-South Asians will come away with greater insight into that culture and the odd mixture of sanctification and calumniation of women we find in our own.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-10-27.
Photo: Anita Majumdar. ©Alex Felipe.
2008-10-27
The Misfit