LEICESTER MERCURY

Review: Shiv at Curve

by Lizz Brain

Director Suba Das writes in his programme notes that Shiv's middle name could very well be 'Leicester'.

And although this is the story of a girl from the Punjab, who is taken to America for a new life by her father Bapu, there will clearly be resonance and poignancy for many second and third generation families who came to Leicester from the sub-continent.

Shiv is onstage throughout the 80-minute piece, and Emily Lloyd-Saini carries it brilliantly. Despite no costume changes, and only lighting and sound effects to denote changes in time period, she manages to convey instantly whether we're dealing with young Shiv, teenage Shiv, adult Shiv.

Her emotions as she is forced to deal with her conflicting feelings about her father, and his continuing impact on her decision-making, even several years after his death, are crystal clear and make for impactful and accessible storytelling, written by Aditi Brennan Kapil.
There are laugh-out-loud moments, mostly connected to Bapu's (Andrew Joshi) fascination with science fiction, and notably when he describes the TV show he is watching as being about "well-meaning imperialists". It's Star Trek, by the way.

But it's also incredibly poignant, delicate, passionate and compelling as the tale shifts in time and focus between the gradual deterioration of young Shiv's relationship with her father, and his influence over her thoughts and emotions in her new adult life in America. There's great work too from Ian Keir Attard as Gerard, who has potential to be a part of Shiv's future, and his uncle, known simply as The Professor (Robin Bowerman), who has unwittingly influenced her past.

Kevin Jenkins' design is fluid, functional and appealing, while David Holmes' lighting is a massive part of the atmosphere in its own right.

Das won acclaim last year with his production of classic comedy Abigail's Party. This European premiere of Shiv, leading this year's Inside Out festival, only adds power to his elbow as an asset of which Leicester should be proud.

THE PUBLIC REVIEWS

Shiv – Curve, Leicester

Writer: Aditi Brennan Kapil, Director: Suba Das

Reviewer: Phil Lowe

The New York Times has described the work of American playwright Aditi Brennan Kapil as ‘Rich in feeling, wide in scope and teeming with poetry’ so it is with great consideration that associate director Suba Das and Curve Leicester have chosen this newly penned one act play Shiv to launch their Inside Out Festival. The exciting festival of fresh new drama, comedy, dance, the spoken word and music is taking place between 22^nd April and 6^th May.

The work that has gone into the production of Shiv is a clear demonstration of Curve’s commitment to the arts, especially new work and the nurturing and exposure of it to new audiences. The set design by Kevin Jenkins is realised as a watery dreamscape by a lake with a raked mattress central and integral to the action. Shiv’s mattress sits aloft a square wooden decking section or landing. The gentle colour palate is a poetic mix of soft colours, the backdrop echoes of the landing by the lake, almost Japanese in the observing. To each side of the raised landing hang equally beautiful facsimiles of blue light shining on water as if grown large and pulled directly from a painting. The whole effect is of calmness and contemplation. Musical composer and sound designer Adam McReady (Poetic Machines Ltd) has created a superbly subtle soundscape that underscores and entirely compliments Aditi Brennan Kapil’s play. David Holmes lighting design is a consummate blend of perceptive shades to achieve the constantly shifting moods of the work.

With only a three week rehearsal period, Suba Das and his four actors have managed to create a superb realisation of Brennan Kapil’s new writing. The story of Shiv (Emily Lloyd- Saini) and her search for meaning in her relationship with her Punjabi poet father Bapu (Andrew Joshi) takes place on and around the mattress – a solid depiction of safety and comfort but also a raft on which she tries to stay stable whilst coming emotionally adrift. Lloyd-Saini’s Shiv is one moment a young girl in awe of her father Bapu, the next a more socially aware adult personality who recognises her father’s drinking problem and his affair. Joshi’s Bapu is viewed as the younger version of himself so even as he plays flying kites with his young daughter and leaves the stage to return minutes later to talk with his adult daughter the poetic nature of the writing gives the illusion credibility and even adds strength to the storytelling. Like much in theatre there is an enjoyment in the theatrical corruption of reality. Both Lloyd-Saini and Joshi work attractively together and especially so in the very funny scene where it becomes evident that Bapu is a huge fan of Star Trek – The Next Generation.

Actor Ian Keir Attard is totally believable and the young American Gerard who lives and works by the lake and starts to fall in love with the enigmatic emotionally adrift Shiv. Their scene when they finally get together yet don’t really is wittily realised. Like much of this complex and very human play one second the audience laughs with the characters and then have their hearts broken. In fact throughout this eighty-minute play the audience is completely taken into this time shifting world of poetics. Shiv is a work of immense quality and depth and deserves a longer run than that allocated at Leicester Curve.

As this is a play about memory and different perceptions of a flawed creative (father Bapu) writer Aditi Brennan Kapil brings in a fourth character towards the latter part of the story. He is simply called The Professor. Robin Bowerman plays The Professor with an intelligent lightness and his recall of Bapu at a summer writing workshop in the past in which he brought with him a blonde lady ‘translator’ serves to add further levels of loving yet devastating understanding of the man who was Shiv’s father.

Most of us go through life with evolving perceptions of our parents. In simple terms there is the complete trust of childhood where the adults and their actions are seen sometimes through rose tinted glasses. Then those confusing teenage years where we start to form opinions of others and often rebel and finally the adult years where it can take years to come to terms with the emotional self and other selves. The play Shiv takes us through many of these feelings and brings an added depth through its witty observations of what it can be like to live in a multi-cultural society and for the young woman heroine to live in two worlds at once.

DIG Boston- preview

IT’S ALL VERY COSMIC: THE DISPLACED HINDU GODS TRILOGY

I remember being four years old, lying in bed with my grandmother as she watched her favorite telenovelas in Tagalog, a language that was meaningless to me although everyone around me spoke it. I was never taught. She would absently pinch my nose, hoping, she said, to make me look “more American.” With my white skin, light hair, and tall frame, my flat nose is one of the only features indicating the duality of my race, and she wanted it erased. Since then, there’s always been a hesitance when I assert my heritage—am I allowed to identify as Filipino?

Photo By Bonni Allen

I’m not the only child of an immigrant family to feel this way. In her series of plays, dubbed the Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy, playwright Aditi Brennan Kapil—who is half-Indian, half-Bulgarian, and grew up in Sweden before ultimately settling in the US—explores a phenomenon she calls “re-mythologizing.”

“They’re myth-making, they’re re-investigating my heritage in order to make it work for me,” she says over the phone. “When I stopped being so apologetic of who I am in this world, I also feel like I connected with other people who are like, ‘Yeah! Let’s just be okay with being this new hybrid thing,’ and kind of owning that and walking proud with it.”

The trilogy, which opens at the BCA Plaza Theatre this Friday, is expansive and bursting with energy, each play exploring the inherent symbolism of the deities of the Hindu Trinity—Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer—through the lens of human stories exploring themes of self-discovery and identity in an era of post-colonialism. “It’s all very cosmic,” she says with a laugh. Kapil’s plays speak directly to the displaced children of immigrant parents who have never been fully able to connect with their own heritage. Though we may look the part, there’s a barrier there—of language, of space, of privilege—that results in a disparity of identity and a lack of true ownership of either culture. “They’re not just Hindu god plays,” Kapil says. “They’re about my people. And I’m just trying to find my way to use these deities and their principles in my way. It’s universal, I think we all, at some point, choose to create ourselves and who we’re going to be in this world. It’s very much about that moment where you have to cope with your past in order to become something new.”

Audiences unfamiliar with Hindu mythology need not be apprehensive, as Kapil assembled the trilogy using plot structures and arrangement methods picked up through her Western upbringing. “One of them is a stand-up—we all know what to do with stand-up. One of them is a girl-gang thriller with a mystery at the heart of it, so we all know how to engage that. And one of them is based in sci-fi and romance. You will know how to be an audience member at that too.” That’s not to say that the plays will be a complete departure from established mythology. “If you have a basic knowledge of Hindu deities, you will catch more. If you happen to know your Greek myths, you will also catch more that others might not.” She laughs. “If you watched a fair amount of ‘Star Trek,’ you will catch things!”

Photo by Hans Harmadi

Summer Williams, Company One co-founder and director of “Shiv,” jumped at the chance to work with Kapil on The Displaced Hindu Gods and expand the perpetually subversive repertoire of Company One. “I think sometimes audiences need to be stretched,” Williams says. “Some people might think, ‘Displaced Hindu Gods? This doesn’t have anything to do with me.’ And I think they’ll be surprised. People will find that they’re watching themselves in a lot of ways.”

Third culture kids aren’t the only ones to benefit from work like Kapil’s. Diversity onstage, represented well, is imperative to keeping up with and reflecting the ever-evolving American experience. These plays are not the place to learn about Hinduism. Nor are they even the place to learn about being Indian. They reach for something deeper, something rooted within everyone who has ever struggled with identity and the need to belong in the world. Kapil hopes audiences will walk away from her plays, after seeing just one or all three (marathon performances will take place on Saturdays and Sundays), “feeling expanded, feeling like the world is larger and more beautiful for containing such a diaspora of humans.

“I would love to think that some assumptions and boundaries that are unconscious and may be shaping our lives would shift a little. I would love it if they left laughing. If the ideas and the universality of what humans struggle with daily sort of kept spinning in their minds over time. I feel like all I do is try to have these intimate conversations in a room in the dark with people, and then I hope that they take it with them. That’s kind of the magic of theater.”

Boston Globe- preview

Hindu gods find a home in Boston

By Joel Brown

You’ve never seen Hindu gods like this.

Brahma the creator appears as a stand-up comedian working through gender-assignment issues on stage. Vishnu the protector appears as a tough-girl avatar named Kalki, who saves a couple of outcasts from the dangers of high school. And Shiva the destroyer sails her mattress on a “cosmic ocean” while trying to navigate post-colonial identity and post-concert T-shirt sales.

The styles are comedy, high school noir, and magical realism. But the struggle for self-definition is always at the heart of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s “Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy.” Company One Theatre is giving the trilogy its New England premiere at the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatres through Nov. 22.

“I set out to find my way into the Indian side of my heritage by writing, which is what I do,” Kapil says. “I’m several times an immigrant, really. So I took these deities and I stuck them into these immigrant bodies in the west, and I just kind of wanted to see what would happen.”

The playwright’s own story is a multicultural epic. Her father was born in a rural village in India and rebelled by becoming a modernist poet and moving to New Delhi. He accepted an invitation to study and teach in communist Bulgaria, where he met Kapil’s mother, who grew up in a family of Orthodox priests. A few years after Kapil was born, they emigrated to Sweden, where she became a punk rocker. She moved to the United States for college.

 “I pretty much spent my entire life not being able to get into any club whatsoever — ever! — or to fit in or be categorized or not fall out of the box I was put in,” she says.

Her “Love Person” hit stages in several states in 2007-08 as a “rolling world premiere” from the Nation New Play Network, and her “Agnes Under the Big Top” did the same in 2011-12. She has also written short plays and plays for young people, and has several commissions in the works.

The trilogy debuted a year ago at the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, where Kapil lives. Individual parts are being produced in a number of cities, but Company One is only the second to tackle the whole thing.

“I thought there was something enormous about producing all three together, and it felt kind of impossible for our company to do that in one sitting,” says Company One artistic director Shawn LaCount. “That felt like a good reason to do it.”

CompanyOne

From left: Ally Dawson, Pearl Shin, and Stephanie Recio star in “The Chronicles of Kalki.”

That’s trademark bravado from Company One. But despite the very different styles of the three plays, LaCount says they all fit the troupe’s regular aesthetic: “A lot of themes that will feel familiar to Company One audiences, lots of different faces on the stage, lots of different experiences. And they’re all a little irreverent, or a lot irreverent depending on which play you’re seeing.”

“Brahman/i,” subtitled “A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show,” directed by M. Bevin O’Gara, stars Aila Peck as a Hijra, or what the script calls “an East Indian hermaphrodite/intersex person,” whose sexual identity changes over the course of a stand-up routine that’s as self-revealing as one of Richard Pryor’s concert movies — and maybe more. It will play the Plaza Black Box, which will be set up as a comedy club.

“The Chronicles of Kalki,” also directed by O’Gara, stars Stephanie Recio as Girl 1 and Ally Dawson as the mysterious hero Kalki in what Kapil calls a girl-gang thriller, set in a high school classroom, a convenience store, and a police interrogation room, among other places. It’s being staged in the Plaza Theatre, as is the magical “Shiv,” directed by Summer L. Williams and starring Payal Sharma as a young woman coming to grips with post-colonialism and her relationship to her poet father.

“There are absolutely traces of myself in all of these plays, but in no way is that character actually my father. Although, that said, I did sell T-shirts at a concert with my father once,” says Kapil, who laughs easily and often. “I almost treat it as a homage: Let me celebrate my dad for a moment, the particular peculiarity of his place in the world.”

As for “Kalki,” “I grew up on comic books and that was my escape. Imagining my outcast self as someday finding my superhero self? Totally a thing,” she says. “With ‘Brahman/i,’ I think that came from the fact that I spent my life so profoundly uncharacterizable, and at some point I just got so sick of caring that I wasn’t fitting in.”

Brahman/i was also the most difficult role in the trilogy to cast, requiring an actor who can play a character of Indian descent, shifting between male and female identification while doing stand-up comedy and slipping into other voices to get laughs.

Peck is the only actor in the cast without Boston ties, recruited in part because she understudied the role in a Chicago production earlier this year (but never went on). She says she’s “half-Indian and half-American salad, like Polish and everything,” and the play has been deeply important to her.

“Aditi’s writing is really something that I connect to a lot, mostly because of her voice for outcasts and Indians in America,” Peck says. “That onlooker in society that never quite feels part of, but is intrinsically ‘in’ a community, I really relate to that. The need when you’re in that role to be able to self-define, to let everything go and just be yourself.

“I had no problem coming to Boston and doing this play,” she added, cracking up, “because it’s hysterical.”

O’Gara directed Kapil’s “Love Person” for Company One in 2012, a challenging production that involved American Sign Language and Sanskrit as well as English. Though the playwright wasn’t heavily involved in the production, she “loved” the end result, and both sides say a connection was forged.

“When we originally started talking about working on the trilogy, I assumed they’d just pick one of the plays,” Kapil says. “I was like, How about this one? Or how about this one? But they decided to do all three in repertory, which is an astonishing gift.” The first two plays were truly finished, but “Shiv” got more work when Kapil came to town for a week earlier this year.

The shows don’t need to be seen in a particular order. “You don’t see repeating characters. What you see are like little Easter eggs, repeating motifs,” says Williams.

On the page, at least, each of the plays leaves room for interpretation. The gods seem in a way vehicles for characters’ real-world self-discovery.

“In ‘Kalki,’ this god who may or may not have drifted through these girls’ lives could also be interpreted as a runaway who appeared in a very, very real way,” O’Gara says. “I think that’s what’s really interesting about all three plays, it gives the audience a chance to question. What we’ve really been trying to do is create that mystery. I think everyone walking out of the theater may have different takes on all three plays.”

DIG Boston- review

DOWN WITH PRONOUNS, UP WITH ‘THE DISPLACED HINDU GODS TRILOGY’

I’ve never cried during a stand-up routine, at least not until I saw “Brahman/i: A One Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show.” And while there was no shortage of quick-witted and well-aimed humor, these weren’t tears provoked by laughter. Rather, they were the silent kind that slide down a cheek not calling attention to themselves, but causing your mascara to run nonetheless.

To be fair, “Brahman/i” isn’t exactly your traditional stand-up shtick, but one of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s plays from her series, The Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy, which is being presented by Company One Theatre at Boston Center for the Arts. Modeling her script in much the same way many contemporary comics do—a narrative instead of one-liners or slapstick—Kapil has penned a show for Brahman/i, an intersex Hindu whose act, they disclose, relies “heavily on the whole just being Indian thing” and “on your lascivious curiosity about what’s in my pants.”

Actress Aila Peck, who dons an androgynous getup and layers on the attitude, owns the material; not a single utterance feels scripted or superfluous. When Peck exclaims, “Who’s the fucker who invented the pronoun?” the words ring true as the cathartic comedy of the “gender-confused” Brahman/i. More than a string of jokes—though Brahman/i does serve up a potent pot of jabs that tackle post-colonialism, sexuality, family, lazy Americans, and acceptance—the two-hour show reveals the insecurities, heartbreak, and, ultimately, acceptance, of someone who grapples with identity, and the cruelty the world has bestowed upon them as a result. Peck—with support from gentle giant J on the guitar (a delightful Casey Preston, his second role of the night)—handles transitions from laugh-out-loud moments to anecdotes about having classmates try to take a picture up their skirt with delicate ease, respecting the heaviness of such a story. Obviously, she, Kapil, and director M. Bevin O’Gara are aware of the effect humor can have on impacting necessary change.

On its own, the ending of “Brahman/i” may or may not have moistened my cheeks, but because I watched it as the conclusion to The Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy series, my blubbering was inevitable. On weekends, Company One presents the entire series—marathoning, if you will—from 3pm to 9pm, with breaks for sodas, sunlight, and samosas. The back-to-back is rewarding as similar themes and language unite the starkly different stories.

In “Shiv,” directed by Summer L. Williams, the daughter of Indian immigrants harbors anger at (and the anger of) her late father, unable to move forward in her life as a result. While the set at times feels clumsy, and the flame between Shiv (Payal Sharma) and Gerard (Preston) flickers when it should glow, the peak into the life of a third-culture kid is delivered with wisdom reminiscent of Kapil’s contemporary Jhumpa Lahiri. Next up, “Chronicles of Kalki,” also directed by O’Gara, is slow off the blocks, but a quartet of talented actors (Stephanie Recio, Pearl Shin, Brandon Green, Ally Dawson) pushes on, building a beautiful, harrowing story of adolescent friendship. By the time you get to “Brahman/i,” you’ve been perfectly primed to laugh and cry. And if Brahman/I doesn’t incite at least one of the two, well then, I’d be curious to hear why not.

Boston Globe- review

Company One puts ‘Hindu Gods’ in a good place

By Jeffrey Gantz

“Did you know that Indians invented the concept of non-linear time? Everything is now. Everything is here.” That’s just one of the many things you can learn about India in Aditi Brennan Kapil’s “The Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy,” which Company One Theatre is presenting at the Boston Center for the Arts. The gods in question are the trinity of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. In Kapil’s three plays they’re displaced to America and turn into women — or at least, 2 1/2 of them do. And though they can’t stop time, they do make it run enjoyably.

Kapil herself knows all about displaced. Her father was born in Punjab, in the north of India; he moved to Delhi to become a poet, and then to Communist Bulgaria, where he met her mother. Kapil was born in Sofia, but then the family moved to Stockholm, and eventually she came to the United States to attend college in Minnesota. She still lives there.

Company One knows something about Kapil: It staged her “Love Person” back in 2012. Now it’s just the second troupe to offer the complete “Displaced Hindu Gods.” Each play runs between 90 and 100 minutes, with no intermission; each is self-contained, so it doesn’t matter in what order you see them. Company One is presenting “Brahman/i: “A One Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show” in the Plaza Black Box and “The Chronicles of Kalki” and “Shiv” in the Plaza Theatre; M. Bevin O’Gara (who was at the helm for “Love Person”) directs the first two and Summer L. Williams the third. (You can see all three plays in one day on weekends, starting at 3 p.m.; the intervals don’t allow for much of a dinner break, but Company One is selling samosas in the lobby.)

There are common threads. Shiv sails the cosmic ocean on a mattress; Kalki arrives in a downpour of rain and takes it with her when she leaves. Shiv and her father, Bapu, pretend they’re on the starship “Enterprise” and fish for constellations; Kalki’s friend has a bedroom ceiling that’s papered with glow-in-the-dark stars. Shiv and her friend Gerard drink bourbon from cups, Bapu and Brahman/i’s auntie pour it into Coca-Cola cans.

The jewel in the trilogy’s crown is “The Chronicles of Kalki,” Kalki being the name of Vishnu’s yet-to-come 10th and final avatar. Played here by Ally Dawson, she’s a superhero who seems to have stepped out of a Marvel comic (Kapil says she grew up on comic books) to save Girl 1 (Stephanie Recio) and Girl 2 (Pearl Shin) from the horrors of “the high school hate machine.” But after being in town just a week, Kalki is missing, and a Cop (Brandon Green) is asking 1 and 2 to tell him and us about her, the play unfolding in flashbacks.

Kalki is a tough — almost too tough — huntress who strips men’s skins to wear as a prize. At one point she tells Girl 2 to “give up your lips or suffer the blue kiss of oblivion.” As the sweet but alienated teens, Recio and Shin are masters of exasperated impatience with Green’s paternal but never patronizing detective; when he suggests that Kalki is their invention, they tell him, “Just because we made her up doesn’t mean she’s not real.”

The other two plays are more problematic. “Brahman/i” reimagines Brahma as “a young intersex girl dude” who tries being a man first and then a woman. Aila Peck is accomplished as she takes on British colonialism, British accents, and more high-school horrors, and Kapil gives her a plethora of hilarious one-liners, but the humor can verge on smirky, and some of the barbs aim at easy targets or miss their mark. The best moments involve Brahman/i’s bourbon-swilling auntie.

“Shiv” has the look of an autobiographical piece, in which Shiv (Payal Sharma), who’s living in a third-floor walk-up in Skokie, Ill., quarrels with her “Punjabi modernist poet” father (Michael Dwan Singh) after he leaves her mother for an American blonde. She gets a summer job as a housekeeper for a professor (Jeffrey Phillips) and starts up a relationship with his nephew (Casey Preston). Singh strikes an authentic Indian emigrant note as Bapu, but Sharma and Preston are oddly stiff and unconvincing together, and the play goes on too long.

And yet it’s hard to complain when Kapil’s fertile imagination is running riot, comic one moment, enlightening the next. All three parts of “The Displaced Hindi Gods Trilogy” are worth seeing, but if you’re seeing only one, make it “Kalki.” The title character complains that being human means being alone, but you won’t feel that way when you see Recio and Shin go off hand in hand.

Lavender Lifestyles: Kapil Emerges as a Playwright of Significance at Mixed Blood

Aditi Brennan Kapil takes traditional male Hindu archetypes and feminizes them into Western situations in her remarkable new play trilogy, Displaced Hindu Gods at Mixed Blood Theatre. The three plays run 80 to 90 minutes and can be seen consecutively or individually. In the bedazzling Brahman/i: A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show I saw Kapil herself substitute for regular performer Debargo Sanyal as an intersex character whose monologue is suited for the comedy club circuit. However, it’s far more intelligent than what has overrun the general stand up scene. There’s true wit throughout as s/he: deals with an eccentric mom who has intermixed her concepts of England and India’s colonial past; as she relates the knuckleheaded reactions of boys to her/himself in adolescence; and as she reveals the groovy nature of an aunt who seems to understand identity issues. Directed with understanding by Jeremy Cohen.

The Chronicles of Kalki is quite simply breathtaking. This sexually raw tale of three teenaged girls -one reticent, one cynical, and one astoundingly daring- plays with our sense of what is real and what is not. Can we actually imagine something or someone to the point of manifesting her into our physical plane reality? Lipica Shah’s Kalki portrayal electrifies as a figure who dares the girls to push beyond society’s accepted limits regarding sex and revenge. She’s given crackling support by Cat Brindisi and Joetta Wright who capture the moral unsteadiness of adolescent girls who lack a coherent value system. And we are tempted not to judge too harshly against their very cruel acts. Director Bruce A. Young has bravely and shrewdly guided this production so that it will strike raw nerves about just what we think is good and just what we call evil.

Shiv is a notable piece that shows how the Western literary establishment, particularly in the US, can shut out Non-Western works out of pure ignorance. Nathaniel Fuller is callous, crusty perfection as a white patriarch of American letters oblivious to how recklesslly he has wielded his influence by unconsciously dismissing literary innovation from abroad. And from a non-white culture. The transformational Shah returns with subtlety in the title role as once again, a figure suspended between a corporeal dimension and ethereal dimension. In coming to bat for the memory of her father, however, Shiv unconsciously throws away the chance for true love. Peter Hansen adds sensitive and sensual support as a white American who Shiv sees not as he is, but only through her archetypal eyes. Risa Brainin’s assured direction benefits from moments of erotic power between these two romantically inclined characters.

'Displaced Hindu Gods' Trilogy is a fine showcase for playwright's broad range of experiences

By Rob Hubbard, Special to the Pioneer Press

Aditi Brennan Kapil might be the ideal fit as playwright-in-residence at Minneapolis' Mixed Blood Theatre. The company has been expanding audiences' horizons since the '70s, allowing them to climb briefly into the lives of people whose experiences might be quite different from their own. Mixed Blood brings the nebulous concept of multiculturalism to vivid life, having among its core values making "the broadest range of human differences acceptable to the largest number of people."

Kapil brings a broad range of experiences to bear on her playwriting, as a woman of Indian and Bulgarian descent who was raised in Sweden and now lives in Minneapolis. It's the Indian strand of her DNA that gets the attention in a magnum opus trilogy receiving its premiere at Mixed Blood. "Displaced Hindu Gods" uses the three deities of that religion -- Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva -- as a jumping-off point for some magical realism about gender identity, teen angst and anxieties and the cultural metamorphosis that comes with emigration.

The three 80- to 90-minute plays can be experienced individually -- "The Chronicles of Kalki" runs on Wednesday evenings, "Shiv" on Thursdays and "Brahman/i" on Fridays -- or you can spend a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon with all three of them, which adds up to five hours in the theater. But the shows are engaging and briskly paced enough to make that a very rewarding experience, as I found when doing so on Twin Cities Marathon Sunday.

'BRAHMAN/I'

For these shows, the Mixed Blood auditorium has been refashioned to feel something like a nightclub, with a bar at the back and little candlelit tables interspersed amid the seating. That works well for "Brahman/i," which is a stand-up comedy routine that, on opening weekend, was performed by the author. She will be alternating performances with Debargo Sanyal, but Kapil proved fascinating company as she riffed in funny fashion about Asia as dysfunctional family, the war on science in Galileo's time and the orgies depicted on the walls of Hindu temples.

But the central issue is how the teen years are navigated by someone of indeterminate gender like the god Brahman. Being pressured to make a choice between living as a boy or girl, the spiky-haired, black-clad comic in combat boots gives each a try and spins smile-inducing stories about her trek down each path. Kapil proved so good at this that it's hard to believe that she's not a seasoned stand-up artist.

Kapil offers hilarious whirlwind takes on the creation of Stonehenge, the naming of Mount Everest and. best of all, a thumbnail "Mahabharata," complete with romantic subplots and action sequences. And she introduces us to an intriguing mentor of an "Auntie" who helps Brahman find firmer footing when addressing his/her issues with gender and being Indian.

It's the only section of the trilogy that could be characterized as a comedy, and the Mixed Blood folks seemed to recognize its appeal when making it the most often-performed play on the schedule, with an additional late show on Saturdays. That's when comedians often work in their "blue" material, but it's hard to get much bluer than those bas-relief orgies.

'THE CHRONICLES OF KALKI'

If laughing at the travails of the teen years is at the heart of "Brahman/i," then "The Chronicles of Kalki" flip that coin and explore the pain and pressures that come with feeling like an adolescent outcast. The structure is something out of a police procedural drama, as a detective is questioning two girls about the disappearance of their friend, an enigmatic, charismatic transfer student named Kalki.

Over the course of the two girls' adventures with this rowdy rebel Kalki -- who teaches them to shoplift and takes them to wild college parties that seem in some kind of hell realm -- it becomes clear that this new girl in school might actually be the final avatar of the Hindu god, Vishnu, whose chief responsibility is to rid the world of demons and, as many translations have it, "filth." She's a kind of one-woman catalyst for an apocalypse, and Lipica Shah brings a fiery, freewheeling energy to her characterization.

But "The Chronicles of Kalki" is the weakest of the three works, both in script and execution. While it holds a lot of promise as a story -- from the framing device that it all takes place over the course of a days-long rainstorm to its enticingly dangerous interactions between the human and divine -- the police interview premise never really takes off, while most of the performances don't convey what a thrilling experience this must be for the characters. It has a little too much teen angst and not enough teen energy.

If you do go, please don't be like the people who brought a small child to Sunday afternoon's performance. "The Chronicles of Kalki" is R-rated, with sexual content, nudity and lots of language. But if you can only take in one slice of the trilogy, this wouldn't be my choice.

'SHIV'

In this series of shows about gods taking human form, "Shiv" is the one most tightly tethered to human frailty and making one's way without direct divine intervention. It's a piece of magical realism that has a lot more realism than magic, unless you count the magic that excellently executed theater can create.

Some will find this little family drama too slow-paced, but I was touched by the vividly rendered relationship between a girl becoming a young American woman and the Indian father who nurtures, inspires and, eventually, disappoints her. The fantastical emerges periodically, especially when young Shivatri uses her mattress to set sail on the "cosmic ocean." But, more so than the other two plays, "Shiv" leaves open the possibility that the main character's connections to Hindu mythology might exist solely within her own imagination.

That's partly what makes it so gut-wrenching when things start to fall apart in very real fashion. Drifting dreamily between memories of Shiv's poet father and her budding romance on the lakeside estate where she's taken a summer job, the play paints a compelling portrait of how one kind of love can shape another.

Director Risa Brainin has convinced her talented cast that the natural pace of conversation works best for this material. With only 15 minutes between shows Sunday, Lipica Shah made an amazing transformation from wild girl Kalki to the gentle, affectionate Shivatri. But Andrew Guilarte almost steals every scene he's in as her beloved "Bapu," a father who helps his daughter find magic in her life, even as his self-esteem is shrinking and his bitterness growing.

After "Brahman/i" goes for the funny bone and "Kalki" for the adrenalin glands, "Shiv" is a play aimed straight at the heart. And it feels as if it's the one closest to the playwright's heart.

Aisle Say: Brahman/i: A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show

Liz Byron

Brahman/i: A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show is one of a trilogy of plays by local playwright Aditi Brennan Kapil being premiered by Mixed Blood Theatre. The series is called Displaced Hindu Gods, and also includes pieces The Chronicles of Kalki and Shiv; all three plays are based around the concept of the trinity of Hindu gods (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva) as people, displaced into contemporary USA.

Brahman/i is set as a stand-up comedy act, with the titular character accompanied on stage only by a bass guitarist, a brick wall, a microphone, and a bottle of water. In fact, you may find that you need to remind yourself throughout the performance that this is a scripted play, not a piece of ad-libbed stand-up. This speaks strongly to both the writing and the acting; Aditi Kapil‘s script flows naturally and is so full of personal confessions, observations, and opinions, that it is almost hard to believe that the person on stage is not Brahman/i. There are two actors who alternate in their portrayals of the main character; we saw the piece performed by the playwright, Kapil, herself, but in alternate performances the role is taken on by Debargo Sanyal.

The story is simultaneously simple and complex. Simple: Brahman/i tells the story of their childhood and adolescence, their observations of the world, and their voyage to answer that universal question, “Where do I fit in?” See? Simple. And yet, complex: Brahman (male name)/Brahmani (female name) is an intersex person and the child of immigrants from India. That is, Brahman/i is a person who doesn’t fit into mainstream culture in at least two significant ways, and has to answer not only internal questions, but questions from the outside world: Are you a boy or a girl? Are you an immigrant, a foreigner like your parents, or are you like us, American, and disassociated from your family?

Kapil’s script keeps up a rapid pace, which might get tiresome or feel manic if it did not move so easily from Brahman/i’s personal narrative and their musings on history, mythology, culture, and gender. It is a risky move, to stage a stand-up comedy routine that occasionally visits some very serious, very personal territory, but it works in this context, because you know that Brahman/i survived adolescence and has gone on to tell the tale as comedy.

Aditi Kapil does an amazing job as Brahman/i. We did leave wondering how a different actor would affect the performance; Kapil comes off as a not-girly-but-decidedly-feminine Brahman/i, and at least based on the press images, the other actor, Debargo Sanyal seems to present in a more masculine way. If you see Sanyal in this piece, let us know! The other actor in the play, Peter Christian Hansen as J, is mostly there for musical back-up, and occasionally as a human prop. At first he seemed so stoic and unemotional that we wondered if he was actually an actor, or just a guitarist roped into sitting on stage, but ultimately, we decided he meant to be that way, and did a good job anchoring the show.

Displaced Hindu Gods – all three plays — are presented by Mixed Blood Theatre, which has a slew if accompanying community involvement events, including audience forums and panel discussions. Mixed Blood also seeks to revolutionize community access to theatre by “Radical Hospitality” , which provides no-cost admission to all performances to anyone who wishes. They also, of course, gratefully accept donations, and no-cost admission is first-come, first-served. You can also guarantee a seat to any performance for $20. This isn’t specific to Brahman/i or the other shows in the trilogy, but it is worth mentioning, since it is, as far as we know, a unique concept in the Twin Cities, and one worth letting folks know about.

Full of sharp observations, heartbreaking truths, hilariously-told anecdotes, and entertaining takes on the history of the colonisation of India, Brahman/i deserves your time. How can you resist a show in which the statement, “Denied of pornography, I turned to Aristotelian logic!” is uttered to describe the emotional explorations of a sixth-grader?  You can’t, and you shouldn’t. This one is well worth seeing.

THEATER REVIEW | "Displaced Hindu Gods" at Mixed Blood Theatre: Two-and-a-half amazing plays

By Matthew A. Everett, TC Daily Planet

Lipica Shah in The Chronicles of Kalki. Photo by Rich Ryan, courtesy Mixed Blood Theatre.

As a playwright, there's something both inspiring and depressing about seeing a really good production of a really good new play.

Inspiring is probably obvious—wow, look what words can do, look what actors can do, look what live theater can still do when you gather a bunch of people in the dark to hear a story told well.

Depressing? Well, as much as you try to live by that age-old advice of not comparing yourself to others and being your own measure of your talent and success, those old demons envy and jealousy creep in any chance they get. Look at that amazing thing happening over there. Why can't I have that? Why don't I have that? The feeling passes, if you're vigilant, but you'd be less than honest if you said it wasn't there. It's a bad idea to compare yourself to other people because someone's always doing "better," someone's always doing "worse." It's a false comparison, apples and oranges, etc.

"Back me up, gentlemen.  Being the oppressor is fun."

Seeing the trilogy of new plays from Aditi Kapil produced by Mixed Blood Theatre, Displaced Hindu Gods, all in one marathon sitting? Take those warring feelings of inspiration and depression; now double them; now almost triple them. Kapil and Mixed Blood and Displaced Hindu Gods had my writer spirits soaring and crashing all night long. There are two-and-a-half amazing plays here. That last half of a play is bewildering, but it doesn't undo the enormous amount of good going on the rest of the night.

"The rest are all in black and white, unless they're bleeding."

It should be noted that you're not required to strap in for all three plays at once. Audiences will certainly get some added bonuses from that prolonged experience, but each of the three plays is a full story in its own right, not dependent on the others for understanding or satisfaction. In fact, there are pluses to taking them one at a time as well, not the least of which is that you have time to let each story and its characters marinate and roll around in your head and heart a little before you dive in for more. You'll definitely want to see more than one, and even though my heart is a little divided on one of these plays, I'd still recommend seeing all three. To be honest, I'd kind of like to see all three again myself, each for its own reason. But it's high time I got specific, so…

"If I owned all of this, I'd never leave."

BRAHMAN/I: A ONE-HIJRA STAND-UP COMEDY SHOW

In Displaced Hindu Gods, playwright Kapil takes the trinity of Hindu deities Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva and spins a different tale in a different genre around each one of them. In Brahman/i: A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show (directed by Jeremy Cohen), the hermaphrodite god, both woman and man at once, takes the stage as a stand-up comedian, sharing a rapid-fire litany of jokes centered on the difficulties of what it was like growing up first as a boy, and later as a girl, to neither of whom the high school years are kind. Defiantly embracing both sides of her/himself as Brahman/i grows into adulthood, the stand-up act becomes a hilarious manifesto. Then suddenly blossoming out of this anger is an unexpected love story.

"You Westerners with your true love and your feelings and your happiness."

Kapil herself alternates performing the role of Brahman/i with Debargo Sanyal. Impressed still more now with Kapil's apparently limitless skills seeing her on stage opening night, I'd be curious to see the play again with Sanyal as well, just to see what the physical presence of a man in the role does to the dynamics of the relationship both with the audience and Brahman/i's electric-guitar-playing straight man J (Peter Christian Hansen).

"I may have a penis and a vagina but at least I'm not this moron."

An extended monologue is difficult enough to compose in such a way that it remains compelling throughout. Turning that monologue into a comedy routine that's actually funny—and about something—that's all the more daunting a task. The fact that Kapil not only pulls off the trick on the page but also can present it in person onstage makes it all the more amazing.

"Anytime, my intersexual friend."

THE CHRONICLES OF KALKI

In The Chronicles of Kalki (directed by Bruce A. Young), a young girl named Kalki (Lipica Shah) suddenly appears right in the middle of the growing pains of two disaffected fellow high school students portrayed by Cat Brindisi and Joetta Wright, turning both their lives inside out. The story is told in flashbacks prompted by the interrogations of the two girls by a cop (Andrew Guilarte) trying to find Kalki, who has now just as quickly vanished from the scene, leaving violence and chaos in her wake.

"The world is full of dangers.  I want you untouched."

Just when you think you've peeled back all the layers of this story and these performances, there's another layer waiting to surprise you. On one level, Kalki is most definitely contributing to the delinquency of minors. On another level, Kalki seems to have been just what these girls needed in order to grow up stronger. Is Kalki the final avatar of Vishnu? It sure would be nice to think so. Chronicles is set in a very real, and sometimes heartless, modern-day America, but there's a strong vein of the supernatural running through the story that strangely doesn't seem out of place at all. Another deft juggling act on the page by the writer, delivered with real passion, pain and humor on stage by the ensemble. 

"Hey, thanks for saving me and everyone I know—but what the fuck are you wearing?"

Shah's Kalki gets all the naughty fun to play with in her character, and comes off as a frightening force of nature not to be messed with. The real bleeding, beating, bruised heart of this story, though, is Brindisi's character. She, too, serves up a dark sense of humor, but it's Brindisi's unstinting look inside the soul of a girl being pushed too fast into being a woman that really knocks the breath out of you. Director Young and this script have pulled things out of Brindisi that were only hinted at before in her leading roles in musical events like Spring Awakening and Hair. Seeing Brindisi in The Chronicles of Kalki is the kind of thing that's going to make other writers want to write still more challenging material for her.  We're all a little envious that Kapil got her first.

"She was the most amazing person that ever happened to me.  I guess I wanted to share her."

SHIV

The third play, Shiv (directed by Risa Brainin), I'm still struggling to wrap my head around. First, though, I have to give some applause to two actors who had me completely fooled. There should be no excuse. I had the program in front of me, I read it. I've seen plenty of theater where actors played multiple roles but I was always able to spot them. I appreciated their skill at becoming several different people right before my eyes, but I was never tricked into thinking that I wasn't still watching the same actor. In Shiv, however, Lipica Shah is back again, and so is Andrew Guilarte, and I didn't recognize either of them.  

"I'm watching this TV show." (Star Trek) 
"What's it about?"
"Well-meaning imperialists."

Yes, the director is different, the characters are different, the storytelling style is different, but Lipica Shah as Shiv and Andrew Guilarte as her father Bapu were not the same people who just played Kalki and the cop right in front of me just a half-hour before. They were completely transformed. One could be forgiven maybe for not connecting the actress sporting the scrappy street punk look of Kalki with the unadorned almost ethereal beauty of Shiv. Kalki's violent streak was the polar opposite of Shiv's patient, slow-burning revenge plot, but Shah makes them both look easy.  So easy, I thought it was two different actresses.

"This is all I have."

Meanwhile, as the cop Guilarte wasn't hiding under anything more complicated than a pair of eyeglasses. Yet he flipped from Clark Kent to superdad without a phone booth in sight. Bapu could have devolved into a generic immigrant, his spirit ground down by his new home country of America being unwilling to recognize his value, since it was nurtured and validated in another part of the world; but Kapil's writing and Guilarte's performance are much more subtle and specific than that. Bapu works hard to give his daughter Shiv an appreciation of America, while also maintaining a respect for the heritage of the place where she was born. He also provides her with a sense of wonder and possibility, so it is hard for both her and the audience to watch the sparkle of his personality get tarnished by the hard uphill climb of needing to start life (and struggle for recognition) all over again.

"I'm not eight, and you're not writing."

While the story of Shiv and her father unfolds in what later are discovered to be flashbacks, alternating scenes find Shiv infiltrating the well-to-do world of white privilege, landing a job maintaining the lake home property of a professor of literature (Nathaniel Fuller). She also infiltrates the family by striking up a dalliance with the professor's nephew Gerard (Peter Christian Hansen, ditching the flannel shirt and woolen cap of J in Brahman/i for, well, often no shirt at all at the lake house). None of this seems calculated, at first. Shiv just seems very driven to succeed at her job, and her off-duty emotions for Gerard seem genuine. It's what's driving her, though, that leads to a confrontation with the professor in the latter half of the play. It's an intriguing exploration not just of a clash of cultures, but a look at economic as well as cultural inequality: who has the money and the power, why do they have it, how do they use it, what does that leave for the rest of us, how does anyone fight the status quo?

"The man who is in charge of everything—what stories are told, and not told."

Here's where I feel like I missed something, like maybe I was watching the play from the wrong angle all along. Now I was having a hard time making the shift to where the play wanted to really take me. The play kept ending, and then kept going. The fact that the character of Shiv and the play itself seem to both come unglued at the same time makes me think the part of the play that baffles me must be deliberate. What comes before is so skillful at just barely skirting the edges of cliche and stereotype and showing me something more complex that I have to believe the same level of skill is being applied to the latter part of the play. Right now, it seems to me to make its point brilliantly, and get me to think about things I hadn't considered before, and then continues when it doesn't seem to need to. For me, the play could have ended ten to fifteen minutes earlier and had the same if not greater impact. The example of the rest of the evening, and even the first part of the play itself, makes me question my trouble with the ending of Shiv—but it's a world premiere, so maybe this play is still getting tinkered with. Maybe the lessons learned in this first production help it reach its final form.

"Are we not magical?"

See any one of Displaced Hindu Gods. Better yet, see all of them—together, spaced out over several nights, doesn't matter. You should see these plays. Great writing, great direction, great design, great acting. All three stories are very different in style and tone, but they all have a smart sense of humor driving them, which makes them entertaining as well as thought-provoking. I'd say it's a great immersion in another culture, but let's face it, at this point it's part of American culture; so it's high time we got to know ourselves a little better. The Displaced Hindu Gods trilogy is a great way to do that.

(Thanks, Aditi Kapil. I'm going to go write a play now. Or two. Or three.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/nyregion/0327stagect.html

Stories of Isolation in an Urban Circus

By SYLVIANE GOLD

Published: March 25, 2011

A smart pessimist in attendance at Long Wharf Theater Stage II might find few reasons to abandon the opinion that life is a fatal disease, or, at the very least, a circus without a ringmaster. But optimists and pessimists alike should agree that this lovely, brooding new play bodes well for the future of the theater.

First, there’s a terrific cast. Eshan Bay, a college senior making his professional debut as Happy, exudes charisma from every pore. Michael Cullen bites into the motorman’s rants with bitter glee. The train carries passengers played by Francesca Choy-Kee, the rare actress who can be soulful and funny at the same time, and Gergana Mellin, as compelling when silent as when nattering at birds or unleashing a stream of Bulgarian invective.

Yes, you read that right. Bulgarian. Ms. Kapil, who came to the United States — Minnesota, to be specific — for college, grew up in Sweden, the child of a Bulgarian mother and an Indian father. This remarkable background gives her an unparalleled vantage point for a play about the psychological dislocation that attends the physical dislocation of life as an immigrant. “Agnes Under the Big Top” is rich in feeling, wide in scope, teeming with poetry and sprinkled with Bulgarian.

The Bulgarians in “Agnes” are the motorman, Shipkov, and his wife, Roza (Ms. Mellin), who left behind the fading circus that had given shape to their lives for who-knows-what in America. Happy came from India with big dreams that cannot quite be accommodated in his subterranean job. And in the title role, Ms. Choy-Kee plays a rueful, hopeful, heartbreaking Liberian who came to America to earn money to provide for her young son, whom she has not seen in 10 years. The other major character — who hasn’t come from somewhere else and who doesn’t ride the subway — is Ella, an aging shut-in cared for by Roza and Agnes in alternating shifts.

Ms. Kapil’s story can be read on the most literal level as a study in loneliness, some of it self-imposed. Ella, played by Laura Esterman, is so cranky she has alienated her son and her two put-upon helpers as well. Even the birds outside her window annoy her. But Shipkov’s subway — given a stark grimness by the set designer, Frank Alberino, and reverberating with Katie Down’s clangorous aural landscape — is more than a subway. The American city it serves is never identified, and we quickly learn that the next stop may be Liberia or Bulgaria or India. Or it could be the terminal, as in terminal illness.

In much the same way, the Shipkovs’ circus is more than a circus — Ms. Kapil’s big top is really big, and it shelters us all. The birds that so exasperate Ella seem also to live in Africa. And they have magical abilities, including a working knowledge of Bulgarian. The playwright has put many accents on the stage, but her favorite language would seem to be metaphor.

Eric Ting, Long Wharf’s associate artistic director, has directed this ambitious, layered play without slighting either Ms. Kapil’s astringency or her flights of fancy. The production trundles along the slick track of her prose like a rush-hour express, aided by a percussive score by Ms. Down and Sam Ghosh (who also contributes a few brief turns as a performer) and an evocative lighting scheme by Tyler Micoleau. At the end of its swift 100 minutes, you will know you got on the right train.

Uplifting 'Big Top' At Long Wharf

Although replete with resonating metaphors and dashes of magical realism, there is nothing far-fetched about this contemporary multi-ring urban circus. Lives intersect while others hover in parallel, but Kapil has created a masterly matrix for what are essentially first-person short stories told by the five main characters.

These stories of isolation contain polar contrasts: hopes for a better life, and battered resilience; yearnings for connection (most often expressed via telephone) in the face of disenfranchised griefs; joy in living, and suicidal despair. Language is also important: Facility in English is pit against learning a new tongue, or else one may be rendered mute; others have few sympathetic listeners. The settings are opposites, too, from a dark subway to a sunlit penthouse, skillfully suggested by Frank Alberino's spare designs.

Yet this lyrical, bittersweet play is a spirit-soaring experience.

Kapil feels compassion for her characters, and in turn, two of the most withered, hardened souls find they are still eager to partake in life's journey. And the script is peppered with a zingy, mordant sense of humor.

Eric Ting, associate artistic director of Long Wharf, directs. He is perhaps the most gifted young directors in our midst and elicits compelling performances from the cast.

It is rewarding to see Francesca Choy-Kee (recently in Yale Rep's "Bossa Nova") finding depths she will continue to plumb in the multi-dimensional title role of Agnes, a Liberian home-health-care aide whose son is being raised by her mother. From the start, we learn that Agnes has been diagnosed with a quick-to-kill cancer, and she strives to find fanciful ways to inform her son of her imminent departure.

Michael Cullen is intriguing as a brutish Bulgarian former circus ringmaster turned subway driver who loves English and its obscenities equally, and who is the fulcrum in the kaleidoscopic turns of stories.

Gergana Mellin portrays the ringmaster's wife with a subterranean passion that bubbles upward with abandon (fueled by alcohol), and sometimes slyness. Her character is also a home-health aide who shares with Agnes the care of a cranky elderly invalid, vividly acted by Laura Esterman (whose wide-set eyes and beautiful face are reminiscent of singer Judy Collins).

Eshan Bay makes a delightful stage debut as Happy, an ambitious, eager and empathetic young man from India. And Sam Ghosh as a hip-hop busker gives the production resounding rhythm.

Agnes Under the Big Top

Audiences take a leap of faith along with scribe Aditi Brennan Kapil in her wonderful crazy quilt of a play "Agnes Under the Big Top," receiving its world preem at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater. The result is a tough and tender play and a production that is as graceful and evocative as trapeze artists flying though air with the greatest of ease.

It could have been an awful fall. Metaphors and symbols -- especially those of the circus, subways and aviary -- abound. Scenes jump globally in time and place. And the narrative is seemingly disconnected and strained with its fractured story lines depicting isolated souls. But under the deft and fluid direction of helmer Eric Ting and a terrific ensemble, the connections this talented new writer have created come together and resonate in deeply moving and unexpected ways.

At the heart of this "tall tale" is Agnes (a luminous Francesca Choy-Kee), a Liberian immigrant and one of two health care workers to the demanding Ella (Laura Esterman). Ella is a an elderly, rheumatoid-afflected woman who favors the silent ineptness of her other helper, Roza (Gergana Mellin), a withdrawn Bulgarian who only talks to birds. Roza's sour husband Shipkov (Michael Cullen), a former ringmaster in his native country, is a subway driver who has more than his share of deadly "jumpers." That's just bad karma, says his trainee, aptly named Happy (Eshan Bay, in an impressive professional stage debut), an Indian youth filled with new-world hustle.

At play's beginning, Agnes finds she is dying of cancer and struggles to find a way to tell her young son in Africa by phone, as she contemplates her last days in this stranger-filled world.

Communication and inter-connectedness is at the heart of the Kapil's work of immigrant isolation, re-invention and even reincarnation.

There's Ella, played with unsentimental truth by Esterman, who leaves long messages on her son's answering machine, longing for a response -- only to feel a bond with a stranger's accidental call. There's Happy, a telemarketer from India, who calls home for help when he arrives in the U.S., ultimately finding his fate and fortune in a random act.

Coincidence/karma threads throughout, until the characters find their separate peace together. Not the least of these is Shipkov and his wife. Cullen plays the transit driver with hard-edged gusto while Mellin's Roza is a heart-breaker, portraying a fragile beauty who finds her specialness not so easily translated.

Kapil weaves a gentle spell with short scenes that move as suddenly and arbitrarily as the speeding unseen trains on Frank J. Alberino's versatile set. Tyler Micoleau's lighting and Katie Down's sound also contribute greatly to the sense of energy and danger in the under- and above-ground worlds. Sam Ghosh's percussive busker also gives the play an urban and urgent pulse.

But just below the surface, there's beauty, love and purpose. With the lightly magical style of a fable, Kapil allows her characters to finally find their rightful place. And in so doing, she finds her own as well.

American Theatre Magazine- January, 2008
Heart-pounding attraction, intense all-night conversations—Aditi Brennan Kapil’s Love Person captures the giddiness of new love affairs. But the play is even more eloquently realistic about the wear and tear that time wreaks on relationships. The story focuses on two couples: Free and Maggie, and Vic and Ram. Free is a deaf woman who communicates through American Sign Language; Maggie, a professor, delights in the lyricism of signing but doesn’t share the isolation it creates for her longtime partner. After Free meets Ram (her needy sister Vic’s latest fling), she gets into an online debate with him about the nature of translation. Though based on a misunderstanding, their conversation becomes a lifeline to both—even as it complicates the chemistry between Vic and Ram and accentuates the rift between Free and Maggie. Will it end in heartbreak or happily ever after? Kapil’s characters reach neither predictable shore, but in the simple word “continue,” they find hope. “I think compromise is gorgeous,” the playwright declares. “The fact that love makes us compromise is immense.” After productions this year at Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre and California’s Marin Theatre Company, the third installment of Love Person’s National New Play Network premiere runs July 24–Aug. 16 at the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis. (Next season brings productions at Live Girls! in Seattle and Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.) The script poses considerable challenges, including projected e-mails, Sanskrit recitations and entire scenes of silence as Free and Maggie’s hands move expressively in argument and reminiscence. Though Kapil isn’t proficient in ASL, she has written it like a fifth character into the play. “There are multiple strands of meaning at play at all times, and who you are—whether you hear, don’t hear, know ASL, know English, know both—all of that will inform your experience,” says Kapil. “It is a show that lives in both languages, just as the characters do.”
—Nicole Estvanik, American Theatre Magazine

Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 2008

LOVE PERSON

Who: By Aditi Brennan Kapil. Directed by Risa Brainin.

Where: Mixed Blood Theatre, 1501 S. 4th St., Mpls.

Aditi Brennan Kapil's "Love Person" isn't just a love story told in three languages: English, Sanskrit and American Sign Language. This smart and insightful work, receiving its premiere at Mixed Blood Theatre, is a love story about language itself.

The play begins with four people in a bar: Free, her lover, Maggie, her sister Vic, and Vic's latest love interest, Ram. Opening with a Sanskrit love poem, the play leaps into an examination of how communication is shaped through various forms of language.

Free communicates only in ASL and finds poetry a mystery. Ram moves freely between Sanskrit and English, but has difficulty grasping the concept of a language based on gestures. Maggie and Vic, conversant in both spoken English and ASL, attempt to negotiate the minefield between Free and Ram.

On one level, "Love Person" is a straightforward romantic mystery, complete with mistaken identities and a Cyrano de Bergerac-style courtship conducted by email. On another level, it is a philosophical discourse on linguistics, language and the complications and limitations of translation. The entire play has been made accessible to deaf audiences through a combination of ASL and dialogue projected onto screens. Hearing audiences sometimes must read the projections to follow silent scenes conducted completely in ASL.

This is heady, complex and often unwieldy material, but director Risa Brainin's strong ensemble of actors do a fine job of making Kapil's intellectual argument accessible at an emotional level. Alexandria Wailes, a deaf actor, imbues the role of Free with explosive energy. With her marvelous command of body language and facial expression, she easily communicates Free's frustration, loneliness and quirky sense of humor without ever speaking a word.

Rajesh Bose's Ram, on the other hand, rarely stops talking. Whether he's rhapsodizing about the wonders of Sanskrit or gingerly treading the rocky terrain of a new relationship, Bose makes his character's enthusiastic love of language palpable. It's a skillful and engaging performance. Erin McGovern and Jennifer Maren offer strong support as Free's lover and sister, respectively, although they are often in danger of being overshadowed by the strong dynamic between Wailes and Bose.

This play is the fourth offering in Mixed Blood's season of plays by women, and it's an outstanding opportunity to experience the work of a skillful local playwright. Kapil's "Love Person" is a fascinating brew of emotion, wit and intellect that challenges its audience to reassess how the form of communication shapes understanding.

-Lisa Brock