Anusree Roy’s previous plays have been monologues — one good, one not so much — that she has performed herself. In Roshni, her new one, she splits a couple of differences. There are two characters, one of whom she plays herself. The play, though short, has some dead patches, but it starts out engaging and ends up very affecting.
It concerns two 12-year-olds (though here they look more like late teenagers), each hustling a perilous and penurious living at a railway station in Calcutta. Chumki, the girl, polishes boots; King Kumar, the boy, sells tea. (“Will that be regular or special?”) He dreams of being a Bollywood star; she, blind from the measles, dreams of regaining her sight. Their paths crossed by accident but, since then and until now, they have always been there for one another.
Each thinks that he or she has found a way out: an escape from sleeping on trains, and being kicked awake by the guards. Chumki talks of an unspecified Boss Man who, if she can raise the money, can arrange for an operation that will cure her. King Kumar has an uncle in Mumbai who claims to know someone who knows someone who, if he can raise the money, will get him a job as a movie extra, after which the sky will be the limit. Twice, we watch the boy talking, on a very unreliable telephone line, to the uncle whose circumstances seem to keep changing and whose financial demands keep increasing.
We also spend time watching the couple at work, sometimes individually, sometimes backing one another up. They supplement their earnings by picking the occasional pocket, for which it’s impossible to blame them. Seeing them do all this is interesting to begin with, repetitive later on: not, of course, as hideously repetitive as it would be for the real people concerned, but this is the theatre. The play’s middle stretches are brightest when musical. To charm more money from her customers, Chumki sings; her strenuous off-key My Heart Must Go On leaves Celine Dion grovelling in the dust, and she does Humpty Dumpty as an encore. (Both English songs, she announces proudly.) Sometimes, King Kumar joins her for a snappy dance routine.
For all this, their friendship is fracturing. Both of them are chasing the same finite supply of cash, and though this might not have mattered when their needs were less, now they’re desperate. Under pressure, each starts to point out to the other what the audience has always known: Their dreams are doomed. King Kumar’s uncle is a swindler, and the boy has no chance of becoming a slumdog millionaire: not the millionaire part anyway. Chumki’s Boss Man is likewise a crook. Almost the most moving moment in the play is King Kumar’s cruelly truthful declaration that the doctor, even if he exists, could never cure her because her blindness is incurable. It’s topped, though, by Chumki’s cry: “I am only wanting the money to see you;” true or not, it’s the most devastating line in any play this year.
Thomas Morgan Jones’ production squanders some energy; the actors shout too much, whether at one another or at invisible passersby. Byron Abalos is frenetic almost from the get-go; he’s far more effective when he quiets down for his chats with his uncle, trying furiously to fool himself, and best of all when he comes into a sad, almost tragic maturity at the end. Roy herself is more controlled, increasingly beguiling, and finally, heartbreaking.
Roshni runs through Dec. 11 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 416-504-7529.
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