Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
by Anusree Roy, directed by Thomas Morgan Jones
Theatre Jones Roy, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
March 3-8, 2009
Anusree Roy’s Pyaasa (2007) was a beautiful gem of a play that managed to create the full impact of tragedy in a mere 45 minutes. Roy’s latest play Letters to My Grandma, boasts a similar brevity and simplicity but has nowhere near the force of Pyaasa. In part, this is because Letters is about reconciliation rather than utter despair. Mostly, however, it is because the material itself is slight and not as inexorably interlinked as it was in Pyaasa.
On the day of her wedding 22-year-old Malobee (Anusree Roy), an Indian-Canadian in Toronto recalls the struggle of her beloved Amma or grandmother (also Roy) who was forced into an arranged marriage at age 17 in India. The structure of the play implies a parallel between Amma’s life and Malobee’s except that Amma’s life is filled with incident and Malobee’s is not. Amma had to fight to escape an India under Japanese attack in World War II, was a refugee in Burma believing herself to be a widow, saw her her husband reappear suddenly after four years’ absence and then had to escape from civil war in Burma. Malobee’s experiences of unhelpful Immigration officials, deceit by their immigration company and playground teasing is in no way comparable. Malobee seems to be in charge of monitoring Amma’s medical treatment back in India, but we hear nothing about Amma’s daughter (Malobee’s mother) and why she does nothing. In the absence of sufficient information, we keep wondering why Malobee feels closer to her grandmother than to her own mother.
Thomas Morgan Jones’s staging is minimalist as in Pyaasa, but here the bangles Amma send Malobee have not gained the multifarious symbolic weight of the pail of water in Pyaasa because they are introduced so late. David DeGrow’s lighting and sound are essential in transforming the nearly bare stage into present-day Toronto and India and India of the 1940s. The prime reason to see Letters is the remarkable performance of Roy, who amazingly metamorphoses into distinct young and older versions of Malobee and of Amma. She is clearly a highly gifted actor who can convey subtle and complex emotions. One only wishes that Letters had more substance.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-03-09.
Photo: Anusree Roy. ©Lindsay Anne Black.
2009-03-04
Letters to My Grandma