The burden of home

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This article was published 10/11/2022 (1064 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It all begins with a phone call.

Qasim, a 43-year-old doctor in Winnipeg, is holding the receiver to his ear, twiddling the cord around his finger, pulling the telephone further and further away from the wall, its coil on the verge of snapping from the tension he is creating for himself and those around him.

On the other end of the line is an unseen mother, thousands of kilometres away, across oceans and mountains and time zones. She misses her son. He is all she has, and he loves her. He will do anything for her — even take for a wife a woman he has never met.

With the cord pulled to the point where the coil becomes a straight line, Qasim (played by Omar Alex Khan) agrees to the terms of marriage. Nuzha (Mirabella Sundar Singh) will be at the airport in a matter of days.

This is the setup for the Winnipeg-raised playwright and actor Pamela Mala Sinha’s latest work, New, a masterful portrait of loneliness, yearning, grief and marriage which blends snappy, Neil Simon-esque domestic dialogue with a dramatic sharpness rarely deployed in a play quite so funny. The comedy runs at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre Warehouse until Nov. 19.

In the process of constructing the characters and interweaving plots of New, Sinha interviewed and compiled stories and tidbits from members of her parents’ generation, who arrived in Winnipeg from India in the 1960s and ‘70s. That work is precisely why the characters feel so fresh and textured. They are composites of not just the Indian immigrant experience, but of a very particular moment of social upheaval, influenced simultaneously by the pull of a former home and the siren calls of a new one: the women’s liberation movement, the fight for equal opportunity and the cultural changes — in style and substance — all young people were trying to understand at the time.

Qasim lives in an apartment building in what is described to be downtown Winnipeg. Elsewhere in the building live two couples. There’s the rambunctious, rabble-rousing Aisha (Dalal Badr) and her husband, the sly, teflon-veneered Ash (a hilarious Shelly Antony, in his Royal Manitoba Theatre Company debut). A few doors away live Sachin (a smouldering Fuad Ahmed) and Sita (played with understated pain by Sinha herself.)

The three apartments are firmly planted in 1970. There are parquet floors and shag carpeting, hi-fis and scotch glasses. The university-employed characters carry brown briefcases. The men wear outfits blurring the line between Steve McQueen and Elton John. Characters read books by Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, and listen to the latest singles from the Doors. They take the Winnipeg streetcar.

While it is correct to say that this play is about a specific subset of newcomers, it is also a mistake. In grander terms, Sinha says it is about the experience of any person trying to find themselves in an ever-expanding world: characters such as these can come from anywhere, Sinha says, because they carry a certain burden of home. They could be first-generation Ukrainian-Canadians, or first-generation Congolese-Canadians. These characters just so happen to be Hindu and Muslim from India, telling a story usually underexplored in the Canadian narrative, but their struggles are universally comprehensible. “These people were all young once,” Sinha says.

In watching the cast — under the direction of Alan Dilworth — navigate their lives in Winnipeg, one can’t help but be drawn inward into one’s own familial history of immigration and adjustment.

The domestic drama brought to mind a favourite film, Joan Micklin-Silver’s 1976 picture Hester Street, in which an Eastern European Jewish woman (Carol Kane) arrives in New York City in the 19th century to join her husband, who has all but abandoned his roots in favour of being a “real American.” New asks what is real? And who are we all in the grand scheme of this Canadian reality?

Can we ever truly move on from where we’ve been, or are we destined to carry the pains and memories of the past with us no matter how far we stray from their origin points?

Despite its at times heart-rending dialogue, New is riotously funny, expertly playing with and distorting characters to elicit big laughs. One of the highlights is when Sachin shows Nuzha a Winnipeg Transit map to get her to understand her new city. He tells her which bus to look for. “It will really come?” she asks — the ultimate Winnipeg koan.

Many of the best jokes go to Nuzha, played with a screwball energy by Mirabella Sundar Singh, who is given the difficult task of being both an object of desire and of pity. She balances these desires with subtlety and Diane Keaton-esque timing.

Each character is given ample opportunity to shine, including one actor not yet mentioned, the white nurse (Alicia Johnston) with whom the now-married Qasim has been romantically involved. At first, Abby seems loud-mouthed and over-the-top, but it’s for a reason; her emotional wallop comes in a later round.

Another character which goes unnamed and unheard is that of domestic silence. Those in healthy relationships often say that a sign of true love is the ability to sit in the same room and not say a word, while both people enjoy the time together. And yet, silence in an unhealthy union is one of the most terrifying guests one can have at the dinner table.

Sinha’s characters breathe real air and cry real tears, because these stories aren’t fictional, even if they are written and performed in front of a paying audience.

These characters are real. They feel pain. And like anyone with a heartbeat, they want to be loved.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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