Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✩
by Pamela Mala Sinha, directed by Alan Dilworth
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
May 1-13, 2012; October 2-19, 2013
“Loss as Part of Life”
Crash, the powerful first play by actor Pamela Mala Sinha, is a deceptively simple work with complex implications that will haunt you long after you leave the theatre. It deals with the rape of a young woman known only as the Girl in her Montreal apartment by a serial rapist. Contrary to the type of revenge fantasies promulgated in popular culture, Sinha’s hour-long play portrays the more difficult, more realistic situation of the effect on the psyche of never finding justice, never experiencing closure.
The play begins with the Girl having to force herself to descend the stairs to join a memorial for her father. The memory of his loss triggers a series of memories related to loss, including the tale of a crime and how she came to lose her belief in God and the sense of personhood she used to enjoy. We flash back to the Girl as a pious Hindu youngster who creates her own shrine out of a plastic milk crate for her bedroom where photos of the 19th-century mystic Ramakrishna and his wife Sarada Devi are the principal images. The Girl portrays an idyllic life with her parents and brother who are amused by her desire to pray a thousand times a day. Her favourite story, beautifully danced in Rubena Sinha’s choreography, was of Mahadevi, a goddess loved by a mortal prince but who loved her divine lord more.
When she moves to Montreal she takes her shrine with her so that it is the first thing she sees when she wakes up just as it was at home. All this contentment is forever destroyed when a man breaks into her apartment and sexually assaults the Girl. Sinha presents the details of the event piecemeal so that we first know something terrible has happened but only gradually learn precisely what it is.
What makes Sinha’s story so unusual is its focus on the mental effects of the rape that seldom are portrayed in drama. Although the Girl is the victim, she cannot avoid feelings of guilt. This is not the guilt of somehow supposedly have led the attacker on that we find in courtroom dramas, but the more inescapable guilt of having brought unhappiness into her family’s life. Though her family is supportive, the Girl can’t avoid linking her father’s subsequent decline in health to her having disrupted her family’s idyllic existence. The Girl is also tormented by guilt because she cannot remember what her attacker looked like. If she could, she could find closure for herself and feel grateful to have saved other women from his attacks. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one’s point of view, the Girl blocked out all details of the attack and only through years of therapy is able to recall what happened--everything except her attacker’s face.
Here Sinha brings forward an awful dilemma. To remember the man’s face will bring her justice, but to remember the man’s face will also permanently make his image present in her mind. The dilemma is like that faced by people who have experienced an assassination of a beloved public figure. The name of the killer is forever linked to the leader’s through his deed, but the mind is repulsed by the notion of forever memorializing the two together. By connecting the assault on her to the natural death of her father, the Girl comes to terms with the difficult fact that loss and loss of innocence are part of life.
For this impressive production, Kimberly Purtell has transformed the simple TMP Backspace into a magic box. Her set has added staircases along the back and a central door that provide such visual interest to the stage and such theatrical potential that TPM should really consider making them permanently part of the space. She outdoes herself in inventive lighting with both blackouts and whiteouts and by suddenly illuminating significant objects as they are mentioned. Cameron Davis’s video design, projecting images on any surface inside the stage box, is seamlessly integrated with Purtell’s lighting as is Debashis Sinha’s vivid sound design. The stage thus becomes the locus of memories seemingly activated by Sinha’s voice.
Under Alan Dilworth’s clear-sighted direction, Sinha tells her tale in a completely dispassionate voice, as if the autobiographical story had happened to someone else, indeed, to the third-person character of the Girl. Sinha’s delivery may seem paradoxical given the events described but in fact it reflects the Girl’s central difficulty, a dissociation from what she thought of as herself, that has afflicted her ever since the attack. The one problem with this approach is that it makes it hard for Sinha to impersonate fully the ten or so other characters who speak in the play other than by pose or gesture. Pop psychology always suggests that people can somehow put terrible experiences “behind” them and “move on”. The calmness of Sinha’s delivery gives the lie to these notions. It the calmness of having had to accommodate oneself to a permanent sense of loss. Crash is an insightful play given a magical production no theatre-lover should miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Pamela Mala Sinha. ©2012 Aviva Armour-Ostroff.
For tickets, visit www.passemuraille.on.ca.
2012-05-02
Crash