A promising show that remains unfulfilled
Little Pretty and The Exceptional
(out of 4) Written by Anusree Roy, directed by Brendan Healy. Until April 30 at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St. factorytheatre.ca or 416-504-9971
Anusree Roy is an acclaimed, multitalented theatre artist: winner of four Dora Awards, a Governor General’s Award nominee for playwriting and two-time member of the Stratford Festival acting ensemble.
She is also a fighter: as she reveals in a program note and online essay, she had a mental-health crisis in 2012 after a diagnosis of arthritis of the spine; she paid for $10,000 worth of treatments through acting and other creative work.
These health challenges partly inform her new play Little Pretty and The Exceptional, which is set in the Gerrard India Bazaar.
There are two impulses running through the piece in tone and theme. One is a family comedy about a quirky immigrant father, Dilpreet (Sugith Varughese) and his two daughters: bookish university student Simran (Farah Merani) and vivacious high schooler Jasmeet (Shruti Kothari). They’re just about to open a sari shop, an independent venture for Dilpreet after decades working for another family.
If you loved Kim’s Convenience, you’ll recognize and likely enjoy these parts of Little Pretty. Roy writes the characters with an affectionate knowingness that fleshes them out somewhat beyond stereotypes.
Kothari in particular does superb work making Jasmeet’s sassy selfconfidence likable. There is some good humour mined from Dilpreet objecting to Jasmeet’s Tamil boyfriend (Shelly Antony) because his skin is too black and his teeth too white, and then denying he’s being racist.
The other impulse is an autobiographical account of Roy’s mentalhealth struggles, which comes through in Simran’s increasingly erratic behaviour. What starts as Merani showing mild physical symptoms evolves into something much more extreme, as suggested by sounds of musical and metallic distortion (designed by Richard Feren) and flashing lights (André du Toit).
Director Brendan Healy and his design team do what they can to knit the material together, but it increasingly feels like two separate plays. The second act becomes increasingly melodramatic as Jasmeet and Dilpreet melt down emotionally in response to Simran’s condition.
Roy’s writing around the play tells us that Simran has schizophrenia, but the play never does, so the audience is left trying to piece together her symptoms. Roy may be saying something about her mental-health issues being hereditary, but this is not clear.
There are also plot points about money that need more dramaturgical attention: what went wrong for Dilpreet in his last job, where the financing for the store is coming from and how Jasmeet can afford outfit after cute little outfit.
Varughese has good comic timing and offers the seeds of a fine portrait of a flawed-but-admirable immigrant patriarch, but his body is disconnected from his performance.
Merani is saddled with the challenging job of playing extended pain and delusion, which goes on for so long that its effectiveness as a stage device lessens. There is also a basic credibility problem in that Kothari and Merani appear too old for their roles.
Tall bolts of brightly coloured silk (designed by Samantha Brown) go some distance to adding contour to the playing space, but this cannot fully compensate for the material being physically overextended on the large, deep Factory Theatre stage.
The lingering impression of Little Pretty and The Exceptional is that it was staged too soon for Roy to have sufficient perspective on the crisis that partly inspired it, and that there may be two excellent, separate theatre pieces yet to evolve out of this promising but unfulfilled material.