Uneven script spoils award-nominated play
The Men in White ★★ 1/2 By Anosh Irani. Directed by Philip Akin. Until Nov. 4 at the Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St. Factorytheatre.ca or 416-504-9971.
The action in The Men in White takes place in two locations: the Dongri neighbourhood in Mumbai, where 18-year-old Hasan (Chanakya Mukherjee) works as a chicken cutter; and a locker room near Stanley Park in Vancouver, where his older brother Abdul (Gugun Deep Singh) plays with an amateur cricket team.
It’s doubtless based on Anosh Irani’s past successes as bestselling novelist ( The Parcel, The
Song of Kahunsha, among others) and award-winning dramatist ( Bombay Black) that his new play has been produced by two important theatres. It premiered at Vancouver’s Arts Club last year and is now opening this Factory season. It’s also been nominated for a Governor General’s Award and published by House of Anansi. It’s hard to square this high recognition, however, with the uneven script and underpowered production offered here.
Over the course of the play’s two hours, the brothers’ back story is revealed and a plot develops about their potential reunion. The thematic terrain that Irani covers is vast: gang wars in today’s Mumbai; how globalization is affecting workers’ expectations and conditions; the power of sport, cricket in particular, to draw people together; Muslim/Hindu conflicts; the darker side of Canada’s immigration system.
Irani is trying to break down a whole set of binaries: good guy/ bad guy (while the title overtly references cricketers’ uniforms, it also hints at heroism), Global North/Global South, comedy/tragedy. It’s the latter relationship that really doesn’t come off. Various comedic styles are attempted: there’s rom-com plus generational humour, as Hasan banters with his boss/guardian Baba (Huse Madhavji) and pines after his pretty neighbour Haseena (Tahirih Vejdani); and male bonding jokes between Abdul’s teammates. But the attempt at a light tone clashes with the seriousness and variety of the themes.
Irani has written a big credibility challenge into the plot: we need to understand Hasan as a gifted cricketer but he lacks the resource to even own a bat, so audiences don’t have much way to invest in that talent. Or perhaps, the distance between his capacities and other characters’ belief in them is intended to be part of the story’s pathos. A lot of responsibility rests with the production to fill in these gaps, but Philip Akin’s staging (viewed at the final preview performance) does not yet draw its various elements together.
The movement of the action between the worlds quickly becomes predictable, and attempts to stitch them together — actors staying onstage in halflight during active scenes on the other side, for example — underline rather than address the problem.
Another concern is lack of ambience, particularly in Mumbai. While we’re told that Baba’s Chicken Centre is on a bustling street and the capacity to interact with neighbours is crucial to the plot, scenes there take place in under-modulated light with little underscoring. Cooped-up chickens draw attention because they’re obviously props. An underused screen where we might have seen projections mostly shows a static image of a map of the world. There’s the impression that money, time, or imagination ran out to bring the production’s physical environment to life.
The pressure is therefore on the actors to hold the stage, but much of Mukherjee and Madhavji’s energy appears to be focused on playing ages that don’t match their own, and delivering Indian accents — which are not entirely necessary given that we are to understand that they are speaking Hindi when they’re actually speaking English. Vejdani comes across more naturally as the aspiring doctor Haseena. There’s a frustrating staginess to the barriers placed between her character and Hasan, but the chemistry that finally emerges between them in a charming second-act scene is welcome.
There’s more going on in the locker room, thanks to convincing characterizations by Sugith Varughese as team captain Randy, Cyrus Faird as the affluent Zoroastrian Doc, and particularly Deep Singh as the sad and empathetic Abdul. Farid Yazdani and John Chou do their best as the younger team members Ram and Sam, but their role in the script to provide boisterous bonhomie feels forced.
I left this production more knowledgeable than before about the cultures that feature in it, but surprised that the education did not come in a more accomplished theatrical package.