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Toronto Star
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
This solo play at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre has one of the most memorable scene openings of the season — and also a major problem
Shedding a Skin 3 stars (out of 4) By Amanda Wilkin, directed by Cherissa Richards. Until May 4 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St. or 416-975-8555 When we first meet her, Myah (Vanessa Sears), the central character in Amanda Wilkin's solo play 'Shedding a Skin,' is confined to a box. Or rather, she's stuck in a generic office cubicle in London, England, grinding away at a job she doesn't like, surrounded by workers she barely knows and an obnoxious, patronizing boss. All of that is about to change, however. In one of the most memorable openings to a play this season, Myah, who's Black and probably in her early 30s, is pressured by her manager to pose for a company photograph with the two other racialized people in the office. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The company, it turns out, has received some complaints about its lack of diversity, and so the three are meant to provide photographic evidence of 'inclusivity in the workplace.' They are statistics, not people. One of them, the office cleaner, is dressed in a suit and not their work uniform. I won't spoil Myah's explosive reaction to this ridiculous scenario. But I should point out that the maintenance employee is upset that the photograph was ruined. He had worked there for 17 years, unlike Myah's six-week stint, and had never, until then, been acknowledged by the company's higher-ups. Dressing up was his idea. Before the day is over, Myah loses her job, her partner and home. But quicker than you can say '21st-century millennial privilege,' she's answered an ad to rent a room on the 15th floor of a tower block. Her new landlady/roommate is an older Jamaican-English woman named Mildred, someone with a heavy Caribbean accent, strict housekeeping rules and a mysterious past. Vanessa Sears in 'Shedding a Skin.' Jeremy Mimnagh/Nightwood Theatre And Mildred, it soon becomes clear, will be the one to make the lonely, directionless Myah find herself and shed her old skin for a newer, more permanent one. 'The space between where I am and where I want to be is deafening,' says Myah about a third of the way into Wilkin's 90-minute show. It's a memorable quote, but it brings up one of the script's biggest problems. Where does Myah want to be? And for that matter, what does she want? Up until then and, indeed, until the show's thrilling and moving climax, she remains a passive figure and passivity is hard to make interesting onstage. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Wilkin does, however, add another dimension to her script by interspersing Myah's tale with third-person accounts of others struggling to get by in various parts of the world. These brief vignettes, while initially disorienting, soon become a mysterious, and moving, commentary on human connection. To make a show like this work, and Cherissa Richards' production ultimately does, you need a strong, charismatic actor. (Wilkin herself performed the play when it debuted at London's Soho Theatre in 2021.) Sears, who is equally adept at musical theatre ('Kinky Boots,' 'Mary Poppins,' 'New York, New York' recently on Broadway) and straight plays ('Is God Is,' Stratford's 'Romeo and Juliet'), commands our attention throughout. Besides suggesting a woman who's searching for some meaning to her life, she easily transforms into various characters, from the judgmental, tsk-tsking Mildred and the passive aggressive manager to the fearless Gen Z cubicle mate at Myah's new job. Each character not only has a specific way of talking but also a unique way of holding themselves and moving through the world. Sears ensures each character comes through clearly. Vanessa Sears in 'Shedding a Skin.' Jeremy Mimnagh/Nightwood Theatre Richards does a fine job in evoking Myah's world. Jung-Hye Kim's set initially seems like a claustrophobic box, but as the show's protagonist begins opening up to new experiences, the box similarly opens up to give her more room to breathe. All of this is enhanced by Shawn Henry's subtle lighting design. And a half-dozen screens hang from the rafters, on which Laura Warren's projections orient us to where we are in the city or, in the case of those vignettes, the rest of the world. Back in 2020, 'Shedding a Skin' won a prestigious writing award in England, and one of the judges was the acclaimed author and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Like 'Fleabag,' Waller-Bridge's breakthrough work, this solo play could also be successfully adapted for a Netflix series. That longer format would let Myah come into her own and dramatize, rather than merely recount, her inspiring, universal coming-of-age tale.
CBC
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Playwright Anusree Roy on what history books leave out about the 1947 Partition of India
When Anusree Roy was commissioned to write a large-scale play for Nightwood Theatre just over a decade ago, she turned to prayer for ideas. "I had this vision of a lineup of women," Roy says in an interview with Q 's Tom Power. "Every day I would sit down and I would just write what I saw, and I heard and I visualized and I prayed. And then a story emerged, and it was women in a speeding truck." Though she wasn't quite sure what this meant at first, she eventually settled on writing a story revolving around the Partition of India in 1947, when the country was divided by the British government into what are now known as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, causing one of the largest mass migrations in history. Partition was the breaking point of religious tension between Muslims and Hindus that had been simmering for decades due to policies implemented by the British government to keep communities divided. Roy's play Trident Moon centres this conflict, following three Muslim women who have been abducted by three Hindu women, all of them trapped in the back of a truck making its way to the new Hindu-only India. As others join them on board, it becomes a tense race against time as they cross the now-divided country to reach their destination. There's no post-trauma. We're inside the trauma. - Anusree Roy Going into writing the play, Roy didn't know very much about the details of Partition other than a few stories she had picked up from her family. She began her research at the Toronto Reference Library, but quickly found that each book said exactly the same thing: Hindus and Muslims hated each other. She decided to look into oral stories instead — it turns out people's stances weren't as cut-and-dried as the history books made them out to be. "It would go like this: they would go, 'We hate Hindus, [but] this one Hindu neighbour saved my life,'" Roy says. "Or, 'The Muslims, don't trust them. Don't trust a Muslim. Except the shopkeeper allowed me to hide and he was a good Muslim brother to me. He was a Muslim brother to me, and I'll die for him.'" Trident Moon manages to navigate the grey area of these relationships without actually focusing on emotion. In the manuscript for the play, Roy indicated that monologues should be delivered without any sentiment. The writing isn't intended to reflect on Partition or explore its living legacy; her characters are solely living in that moment, since there's no time for feelings when they're just trying to make it out alive. WATCH | Official trailer for Trident Moon: "When my grandmother used to tell me stories, she never talked about how she was feeling inside of what was happening — she just talked about wanting to survive," Roy says. "The survival is happening inside that truck. We're going to feel later. There's no post-trauma. We're inside the trauma." Now living in Los Angeles, Roy was one of more than 100,000 people forced to evacuate their homes due to recent wildfires, which has given her a new perspective on the play since she first wrote it. Though it doesn't compare to Partition, she says the experience did make her reflect on how terrifying it can feel to leave everything you know behind. Separated from her husband and knowing the fires were just minutes away, Roy forgot her medication, her wedding gold and other important possessions. "A taste it left in my mouth was that overnight fleeing, with the only thing you're wearing or whatever you can shove in a suitcase, is nauseating. I never want to experience that again." There are other aspects of the play that Roy sees as being relevant in present-day society, like how it's up to future generations to keep these stories alive, so history is not repeated. "I can see this play actually happening in the future," she tells Power. "These things happening to women like this, and having to flee … that's actually not a very shocking reality. None of my grandparents are here anymore. My parents hold on to their memory, but after that, it's just up to us, what we tell, what we do with these stories." Roy wrote and stars in Trident Moon, which runs until March 30 at Crow's Theatre in Toronto, and then from April 2 to 12 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
