THEATRE REVIEW

MARCH 2024 | Volume 237

 

Production image

Nimet Kanji, Talia Vandenbrink, Photo credit Emily Cooper

Dil Ka
by Lee Nisar
Ruby Slippers Theatre, Blackout Arts Society & Presentation House Theatre
Presentation House Theatre, North Vancouver
Mar. 21-31
$34/$27/$22
www.phtheatre.org or 604-990-3474
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I know absolutely nothing about what it would be like for a young woman to grow up in a Muslim-Canadian household, so I found the first half of the first act of Dil Ka a fascinating glimpse into that world. Twenty-six-year-old Zahra (Talia Vandenbrink) tells us her story as she nervously prepares chicken biryani in her family’s kitchen to serve to a prospective husband and his mother. It turns out Zahra has asked her Pakistani-immigrant parents to arrange a marriage for her.

Zahra has had no luck with men. She has even tried a Muslim dating app and struck out. She’s a good Muslim girl: loves her parents, dresses modestly, gets good grades, and prays five times a day. She has even taken religious classes at the mosque and loved them. But she’s also a thoroughly modern Canadian woman. She hates the way the men in her community take women for granted and see her as only a prospective wife.

She can’t really explain her frustrations to her Mama (Nimet Kanji) or Baba (Parm Soor), and certainly not to her younger sisters, Aisha (Rami Kahlon) and Sania (Janavi Chawla), all of whom are anxious to see her married off to a handsome, well-off husband, as if in a Pakistani-Canadian version of Pride and Prejudice. Zahra’s only real confidante is her best friend, Jaz (Tanaz Roudgar), a more relaxed, more liberated, tomboyish university grad.

Here is where things started to go off the rails for me. All of Dil Ka’s PR material makes clear this is a “queer Muslim” story, so no spoiler alerts needed. The rest of the play will be about Zahra’s struggle to admit to herself that she loves Jaz, that men physically repulse her, and that her attempts to find an arranged husband are a charade. Yet she also has to reconcile that struggle with her Muslim faith in which homosexuality is a sin (the story of Lot’s wife looms large) and with her deep desire to please her parents, whose sacrifices for her she admires and respects.

But up to this point Dil Ka has been essentially a sitcom. Kanji is a very good actor, but the Mama she plays here is a broad stereotype and Soor’s Baba is a clown. Much of their dialogue is of the “Where did I go wrong,” “She’s not getting any younger,” “I just want to make her happy” variety. But suddenly, at the end of Act One, the play becomes a melodrama. And Act Two shifts back and forth between sitcom and melodrama in a jarring clash of styles. Neither style is especially conducive to dealing with the real issues at the heart of the play.

This is primarily a flaw in Lee Nisar’s script, but director Tricia Trinh also bears some responsibility for the production’s failure to mesh stylistically and for the excessive repetition that makes the play longer than it needs to be. This is the premiere production so these things should be fixable for next time.

Meanwhile, I enjoyed much of the acting, especially Kahlon’s Aisha and Roudgar’s Jaz. Vandenbrink’s Zahra admirably carries the show despite playing “nervous” a little too much. I liked Kimira Reddy’s kitchen set with its many working props and Mishelle Cutler’s clever sound effects for running water and sizzling chicken. I liked learning about the dilemma of a queer Muslim-Canadian woman, but I wish it had been written and staged more consistently.

 

 

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Vancouver's arts and culture website providing theatre news, previews and reviews