‘New’ a fresh take on on-stage portrayals of new immigrants deserves to get the on-screen series treatment

They drink, they smoke weed and cigarettes, they lead women’s lib protests, their desires stray outside the bonds of marriage.

“New,” Pamela Mala Sinha’s portrait of a friend-group of Bengali intellectuals in 1970s Winnipeg, is a strikingly fresh take on stage and screen portraits of first-generation immigrants. As Sinha noted in a 2022 interview with the Globe and Mail, Canadian playwriting tends to come from the second- and third-generation perspective, with parents often used as comic foils and portrayed as old-fashioned (think Mr. Kim in “Kim’s Convenience,” which started its life as a play).

While fictional, this play, produced by Necessary Angel in association with Canadian Stage and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, is inspired by the real lives of Sinha’s parents and their friends: her mother was a successful dancer in India with Uday (brother of Ravi) Shankar’s troupe and her father was recruited from the London School of Economics to the University of Manitoba.

It centres on Qasim (Ali Kazmi), a medical doctor in Winnipeg who, in the play’s first scene, gets married over the phone to a woman he’s never met at the insistence of his mother, who’s gone on hunger strike until he gives in. That’s a near-comedic scenario, but in Alan Dilworth’s thoughtful production it’s not excessively played for laughs and, in the scenes that unfold, the audience observes the challenges that Qasim and his new bride Nuzha (Mirabella Sundar Singh) experience as they forge a life together in his bohemian environment.

As the play continues we get some useful background as to why Qasim is so devoted to his (always-unseen) mother, putting historical meat on the bones of what could have been a cliché of generational divide.

Qasim and Nuzha live in the same apartment building as two other couples: rabble-rousing Aisha (Dalal Badr) and her grad student husband Ash (Shelly Antony), and former dancer Sita (playwright Sinha) and her husband Sachin (Fuad Ahmed), who are recovering from a tragic loss.

Some are Muslim, some are Hindu, but all embrace the counterculture: Aisha with near-religious fervour, Ash as a new devotee of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and, for everyone, a new Doors album is cause for celebration. Bringing the detail and texture of that time and place to life is one of the key drivers of the play, which revels in local Winnipeg details while also depicting how the characters work to integrate cultural traditions into their modern lives, as when Sita and Qasim adapt a Bhai Phota ritual usually enacted by brothers and sisters to honour their deep friendship bond.

There are so many such fascinating episodes and layers to this play that it feels like it’s somewhat bursting out of its 21/2-hour length (including intermission), just as the production strains at the seams of the Berkeley Street Theatre: Lorenzo Savoini’s set of three side-by-side apartment rooms is so wide that they’ve had to turn the theatre’s lobby into its wing space.

At times I felt like I was being told about aspects of these people’s lives, such as Sita and Qasim’s bond, without having actually seeing it demonstrated, because the play (as plays do) drops us into the middle of the characters’ situations. These rich stories feel like they could easily fill a TV miniseries or film, following on from the 2020 film adaptation of Sinha’s 2015 play “Happy Place.”

Another storytelling concern is that so many of the characters are at or nearing states of stasis. Ash/Aisha and Sachin/Sita’s marriages are stalled for different reasons. Sita in particular is trapped in grief, expressed in anguished monologues that Sinha performs with compelling intensity. Monologues in which other characters reveal what’s underlying their actions, inactions and motivations are highlights, as when Sachin explains his hesitancy to act on his desires, and Qasim unpacks how the partition of India and Pakistan continues to rupture his family.

In that context, Nuzha’s story emerged for me as the play’s most compelling element, because she’s someone who’s on such a vibrant literal and metaphorical journey of change and blossoming. It’s not just Nuzha’s frequently dazzling self-presentation in bright saris and jewelry (costumes by Michelle Bohn) that compel: it’s the clarity of all aspects of Singh’s performance, including her remarkably resonant voice.

It’s a convention of the play that the characters speak English throughout: without accents when we are to understand that they’re speaking Bengali and with accents when they’re speaking English. While this distinction is at times slightly fuzzy, overall the convention works well, and the moments when there’s a switch to English are used cleverly to both reveal character and comment on complex relationships.

Much of the richness of the production comes in the emotional presence of the actors in one-on-one scenes, including those between Qasim and his white girlfriend Abby (Alicia Johnston) as well as those between the married couples.

This includes a heart-wrenching final episode in which Nuzha and Qasim move out of deadlock and into a space of new possibility. This, among many other aspects of this strong play and production, made me hope that we see these characters’ stories extended backwards and forwards in an expanded telling, perhaps in another medium.

New

By Pamela Mala Sinha, directed by Alan Dilworth, At the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St., through May 14. canadianstage.com and 416-368-3110

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