Arts & Culture

What: Trident Moon
Where: Crow’s Theatre, 345 Carlaw Ave.
When: Now, until Sun., March 30
Highlight: Director Nina Lee Aquino’s precise staging
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: It’s a tense sociopolitical drama that knows how to make its audience squirm

THE FIRST THING you see in Crow’s Theatre and the National Arts Centre’s co-production of Anusree Roy’s Trident Moonis a piercing line of light radiating outward from a jagged crack that bisects the stage (set design by Jawon Kang, lighting by Michelle Ramsay). Set in the immediate aftermath of the infamous 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent, this striking image sets the scene for the luminous drama of division that follows.

The plot’s attention is fixed on nine women and girls in the back of a truck that’s hightailing it out of the newly formed Pakistan toward the Hindu-controlled India. Joined together by unimaginably fraught circumstances, these passengers make a perilous journey across the British colonial authorities’ shoddily drawn border. Different coloured saris help easily distinguish which of them are Hindu and which are Muslim (costumes designed by Ming Wong). So too does Nina Lee Aquino’s blocking, which initially places the two camps rigidly on opposite sides of the aforementioned line on the floor. The reasons and circumstances that ultimately prompt characters to cross that semi-imaginary barrier tell a visual story all on their own, with it being especially notable how the child characters (Sahiba Arora, Prerna Nehta and Michelle Mohammed) traverse that social boundary with a greater sense of ease than their more rightfully prejudiced adult counterparts.

Kang configures the entire stage to become the interior of the truck’s cargo hold, which appears a bit more spacious than one might expect. That said, the playing space is smaller than usual by the standards of Crow’s malleable Guloien Theatre, so perhaps its dimensions are an accurate recreation of these kinds of transport vehicles. (I’ll confess that I’m old enough to remember the Canadian premiere of Clare Bayley’s The Container, which set a high bar for claustrophobic stagings of cross-border migration.) Romeo Candido’s sound design is strewn with enough not-so-distant gunfire to keep the threats from without at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Trident Moon is not for the faint of heart. Though its first half moves at a measured pace to establish the character dynamics and exposit the historical context, that’s all a setup for an unrelenting second half that keeps trying to one-up itself at how much it can make the audience squirm in their seats. The fight and intimacy direction by Cara Rebecca is a sight to be seen, even if only glimpsed through the cracks between your fingers. As intense as it becomes, the violence remains grounded in thick realism that never feels gratuitous or inappropriate to the harsh realities that consume this dark chapter of South Asian history.

Aquino has assembled an ensemble cast without a single weak link among the 10-member chain. Roy herself portrays a figure who emerges as a de facto protagonist, exhibiting the highest intensity throughout and deeply experiencing the plot’s most crushing blows. Mirza Sarhan, as the cast’s lone male, handles his role with nuances that expose a soft underbelly beneath genuine menace.

Two other standout performers are Afroza Banu and Zorana Sadiq, both of whose characters are utilized as sources of levity that seek to brighten this tragic blackhole with their impeccable comedic vibrancy. Though, with that in mind, if I have one major critique of the show, it lies in its imperfect balance of humour and despair. Quite frankly, I wish this play didn’t feel the need to try to be so funny. One line in particular about women who were forced to jump into a well provoked an unsettling amount of laughter on opening night, and not in the way that really challenges the audience to question why they’re so amused. I’m reluctant to use the term “comic relief” because all the jests are frontloaded before there’s been a serious establishment of the tension from which we might actually need relief; fortunately, they do come to an abrupt halt once the tone turns a sharp corner into the horrific.

My personal belief that not every play needs to have a generous smattering of humour — a position that is often met with resistance in Canadian dramaturgical sensibilities — doesn’t mean that it must, therefore, be gloom and doom from beginning to end. One of Trident Moon’s most tender moments is also one of its simplest: when the characters briefly pause their quarreling to share a bag of raisins. Even if I found some of the other attempts at gaiety to fall flat, I greatly admire Roy and Aquino’s perceptive abilities to locate hope for humanity in the smallest gestures.