South-Asian Canadian playwright prepares to go back to high school
Performer gains new perspective updating The Fish Eye Trilogy for a younger, modern audience
Anita Majumdar is not only willing but thrilled to be going back to high school.
The Dora-nominated choreographer, playwright and actor is best known for The Fish Eyes Trilogy (though you may also recognize her from Deepa Mehta’s Salman Rushdie adaptation, Midnight’s Children): a trio of solo shows that each portray a different girl at the same high school in Port Moody, B.C., Majumdar’s hometown.
As performer, Majumdar incorporates her background in classical Indian dance to add another layer to these coming-ofage stories, each conveying a laundry list of teenage issues: fitting into mainstream culture, female friendship, romantic rela- tionships, cultural appropriation, bullying, and consent and sexual assault.
The Fish Eyes Trilogy has appeared across the country and, last year, was published by Playwrights Canada Press. But until now, there was an element missing.
“Not that long ago, I was asked, ‘Have you thought about making Fish Eyes for young people?’ And it had never really crossed my mind,” Majumdar says. “I just wanted to tell the stories of young people
“I’m pretty prepared to have my mind blown.” ANITA MAJUMDAR CHOREOGRAPHER, PLAYWRIGHT AND ACTOR
from the perspective of someone who was now out of high school.”
A version of Boys With Cars adapted specifically for ages 13 and up, opens Thursday at Young People’s Theatre. It includes two-thirds of The Fish Eyes Trilogy.
Boys With Cars is about South Asian-Canadian dancer Naz, who longs to escape Port Moody.
Naz gets caught up in a scandal, while Can I Borrow That Top? focuses on her bully, Candice, a white girl who plans to attend the Coventry School of Bhangra to become the best Indian dancer in the world.
“Even when I was doing school touring (of Fish Eyes), there would be young women who would want to hang out with me while we were packing up the set. They didn’t quite know how to form the words for a question or anything; they just wanted to touch my costume and hang out,” says Majumdar. “It felt like it was making a difference in some way.”
As part of a commission between YPT, Nightswimming Theatre and the Banff Centre, Majumdar has had to cut and edit her plays, which she first started working on during her final year at Montreal’s National Theatre School in 2004, and finished — or so she thought — in 2014.
But the time was right to bring her work to the audience that needed it the most, she says, despite the extra effort.
“Just given the current climate and the conversations we’re having around which women deserve empowerment and which women don’t, the question I have certainly is, ‘How do we come to a consensus?’ It’s so complicated, I can’t even imagine being in the microcosm of high school and trying to unpack that stuff in a safe way.”
Pulling from some of her personal experiences, Majumdar had to wait until she had some distance from high school before she could tackle the issues in her plays.
“Writing these plays has also been my way of reconciling what I was not able to do in high school. I felt like I couldn’t speak up for other people or, when it was happening to me, it felt like there was this underlying fear of, ‘Well I’m just going to make it worse. I’m out here by myself. I just need to keep my head down and get through it.’ Now my adult self feels really guilty about that.”
Even so, Majumdar says today’s teenagers are better equipped to handle these conversations than when she was young and experiencing first-hand the pain of cultural appropriation: for example, going from being bullied for wearing a bindi to seeing it become a fashionable trend among her white peers.
After conducting a focus group with local high school students to gather discussion questions for Boys With Cars, Majumdar was astonished by the level of analysis that students were applying to the issues in the play, which prompted her to trim the script even more to accommodate as much time as possible for talkbacks, which follow each performance.
And even though the plays have been published, she’s considering making some of what she’s learned from this process permanent, even before the production tours to Saskatoon and Montreal.
“I don’t think I knew the issue around race was bigger than me just feeling crappy at school,” she says. “I think I’m going to learn a lot. I’m pretty prepared to have my mind blown.”
Pulling from some of her personal experiences, Majumdar had to wait until she had some distance from high school before she could tackle the issues in her plays