Take d Milk, Nah?

Written by Jivesh Parasram. Directed by Tom Arthur Davis. Until April 22 at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave. PasseMuraille.ca or 416-504-7529

With a subgenre of indie solo shows as rote as the “identity play,” the last concern one might expect to have writing a review of one is avoiding major spoilers - spoilers not just of plot points or that alter an audience’s perception of the performer; but around style, form, attitude and, even at one point, physical location.

Writer and performer Jivesh Parasram, whose identity we are supposedly discovering in Take d Milk, Nah?, describes the identity play as “a few stories from, like, their childhood and, like, puberty and, like, online dating or about their grandmother’s hands” that make audience and performer alike feel enlightened, introspective and reach for a phone to call home.

But despite his initial unwillingness to write an identity play, here it is: the first “Indo-Caribbean-Hindu-Canadian identity play” to his knowledge.

It’s the final production in Theatre Passe Muraille’s 50th-anniversary season in a co-production with Pandemic Theatre and b current performing arts.

Pandemic Theatre, of which Parasram is co-founder along with Take d Milk, Nah? director Tom Arthur Davis, has had a busy year of unsettling productions. They toured Adam Lazarus’s controversial solo show Daughter, about misogyny and sexual assault, across the country; and produced The Only Good Indian at the 2017 SummerWorks Festival, which looks at what drives humans (yes, you) to extremism.

Parasram’s segue from his skepticism around the identity play to the history of Indian “indentured servitude” in the Caribbean, stemming from the colonial evils of Winston Churchill, is chillingly engrossing, as is Pandemic’s style, but not particularly new territory for the company.

Parasram continues to track that history, connecting it to his family, eventually leading us to exactly the kind of sentimental identity play he claims to find uninspiring, involving a childhood trip to visit family in Trinidad where he attempts to birth a cow, which is a sacred act in the Hindu religion. As he explains, the elixir of life comes from churning an ocean of milk.

An honest review would say Take d Milk is charming, makes you laugh, cry and reach for the phone to call home. This is not where the spoilers come in. But there is a stiffness to Parasram, his opening screed still hanging in the air, that leaves an uncomfortable undertone.

That’s when the production flips the identity play on its head - to the tune of Cream’s “White Room” - much like the Devas (demi-gods) and the Asuras (demons) flipped a mountain upside down to churn the ocean of milk, and this is where the spoilers come in.

The shift is disorienting and feels rudderless. A little overly stylized, depending on your taste, or pretentious. But the final third of Take d Milk, Nah? faces much more complex questions of identity (why do we need it to exist? who needs it to exist? when does it hurt and when does it harm?) and, for this white, privileged female critic, theatre itself.

What are we asking when we ask to hear other people’s experiences? Who are we really interested in learning about? What are the gaps we don’t know are there? What are the restrictions we subconsciously ask people to meet?

It’s a lesson in intersectionality and its difficulty will likely lie in relation to one’s own experience as either feeling represented in mainstream society or marginalized by it.

That divide plays a very significant part at one point in the play, a device that transfers access to space from a mainstream group to a marginalized one. I was impressed — nay, thrilled — by its boldness. I still feel that way, but I’m less impressed by my reaction.

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Parasram has created a tight script, with plenty of connections and parallels to keep your head swimming as you leave the theatre. But en route home, as I thought about the Hindu concepts of cows and milk and fire and destruction and oneness, I was embarrassed by my thrill in feeling marginalized, even for an extremely brief period of time.

When an experience of being “othered” is exciting, rather than demeaning or frustrating, that’s an inauthentic experience. This is my confusion, not Parasram’s — he admits in the play that feeling is impossible to communicate. So why was I expecting him to? What was I hoping to gain by adopting a marginalized identity in that specific moment?

Whose identity are we really looking at when we see an identity play?