The Toronto Theatre Review: Tarragon Theatre’s A Poem for Rabia

By Ross

The women speak of the land of many waters, political convenience, and the abolishing of prisons, hundreds of years apart. She fears. She goes, always in motion but sometimes completely still. There, in the distance, is the rise and fall of the land of her body disappearing behind her, on the edge of dark waters. How light, we are told, is the idea of liberation. And how deep and emotional is this play working so hard at developing.

These are just a few of the poetic frameworks and ideas that float out in Tarragon Theatre‘s determined production of A Poem for Rabia, written with a broad stroke and gentleness by Nikka Shaffeeullah (Why Not Theatre/TMU’s TomorrowLove). The production, in association with Nightwood Theatre and Undercurrent Creations, has large ambitious formulations to untangle, wrapped up inside this dramatic creation born out of an idea of being from many places, born in only one, yet connected to many others.

As directed with inventive sweetness by Clare Preuss (Dead Roads’ She Spreads) and the show’s dramaturge, Donna-Michelle St. Bernard (Downstage’s The F Word), the impressive textual quality of A Poem for Rabia tries with diligence to transverse oceans and centuries of time, unpacking generational trauma against a backdrop of powerful history. It pulls on the stories of three queer women, we are told, from the same bloodline. (Although the queer part rates somewhat low in its unpacking.) Starting further along in the future with Jahra, played by playwright Shaffeeullah, as a frustrated, mourning activist in the year 2053, disillusioned with the world she lives in, while tasked with helping her colleagues to navigate a Canada that has just abolished prisons. She’s a hard soul to connect with, feeling like a “fairweather descendant” disconnected from her ancestors, and stuck inside her head; weighed down by grief and a sadness that feels vague and unapproachable.

The play draws out these aforementioned ancestors to dig into their communal generational trauma with empathy and compassion, introducing us next to Betty, a remote but determined polite woman, just starting a job as a secretary to the Governor in 1953 British Guiana. As embodied most carefully by Michelle Mohammed (Coal Mine’s Yerma), Betty, typing 80 words a minute, tries hard to keep her progressive views to herself; head down and working hard, but eventually, as she becomes more engaged and connected with her coworker, (an idea that isn’t fully developed), she is drawn into a conflict between putting her new job at risk and the growing national independence movement that her coworker has embraced completely. And wants her too as well.

But one hundred years prior, in 1853, we are gifted with the determined and engaging Rabia, wonderfully embraced and embodied by Adele Noronha (Arts Club’s The Orchard), an Indian domestic worker adept in spoken poetry, who walks herself forward with clarity and determination. She doesn’t like the bigness of the waters before her, but she must, she tells herself, go forward, as she has no future in the world that she is walking away from. She is magnificent in her posturing, finding humor and connection with every interaction. We walk with her as she is basically abducted by colonial recruiters. Without being able to fully understand or read what she is agreeing to, she finds herself sailing solo from Calcutta to the Caribbean looking wide-eyed ahead to many years of indentured labor under the power of British colonizers.

The three women unpack and engage, attempting to find connection in the air that surrounds them, even with centuries in between. It’s a huge venture, and one where this small theatre space, as used by set designer Sonja Rainey (Bicycle Opera Project’s Sweat), doesn’t give it a wide and open enough canvas for the play’s intricate conceptualizations to be fully realized. A pool of water, surrounded by ramps (that do a good job as desk set pieces and for storing numerous props), keeps us at an emotional distance from the clarity that the actors are trying to distribute. It’s there as a visual concept of something that isn’t used enough to warrant all that it takes away from the intimacy of the play, and the water as a symbol in the last moments of the play isn’t clear enough or unpacked enough to make it all worth the trouble.

But the play does a good job weaving these worlds together, even if at a distance, but the connective tissues aren’t as strong as one may hope. It’s endearing, this play, filled with an emotional level of care and love that can’t be denied, but it plays out long and slow, with very little reason to lean in. The turmoil these three live within resonate, although the sexual energy doesn’t feel as important or unearthed enough to fully resonate. Utilizing some great costume changes, courtesy of designer Jawon Kang (Factory’s Armadillos), the show’s use of its other three actors, notably the wonderful and gifted Virgilia Griffith (Soulpepper’s Queen Goneril/King Lear), the impressive and captivating Jay Northcott (Theatre Outré’s Parasite), and the engaging and sweet Anand Rajaram (Tarragon’s Buffoon), find exacting characters to play in the differing timelines laid out before them. Each are strong and detailed in their portrayals, drawing us deep into the concept, and helping us connect to the three central women at the core of this play to an even greater degree. Without their work, the play would feel much more distant and stilted.

Shaffeeullah doesn’t, ultimately, do this immense play a huge favor by taking on the difficult role of the depressed and mourning Zahra. Trying hard to flesh that emotional range out and pull us in as she languishes in the back of the set weighed down under a blanket is a huge and complicated task, one that I’m not quite sure the playwright as actor is truly up for. Her reading of the text feels overly dramatic and/or unapproachable, keeping us far away from the intrinsic formula, while the other two, Mohammed and Noronha do a magnificent job finding the weight and the emotional delivery to really connect.

With detailed lighting delivered well by Echo Zhou 周芷會 (Studio 180’s The Chinese Lady) and the adjacent musicality that is layered on by composer/sound designer David Mesiha (Crow’s 15 Dogs), A Poem for Rabia stays its course, attempting to find the emotional connective tissue in the smaller slices of care and connection that these women are trying to embrace. But as a whole, beyond our simple emotional connection to both Betty and Rabia, A Poem for Rabia is still in need. In need of some focused restructuring and some tightening.

Much like the awkwardness and misuse of the light that reflects back at us from that ill-tempered shimmering back wall, the poetry fails to flow when delivered by Shaffeeullah hundreds of years in the near future (which doesn’t really feel all that different from today, or even from yesterday) near the end of the play. It feels like we are being invited by the playwright to get on board an emotionally engaging ship in order to find our way toward some sort of reconciliation. But it doesn’t work as well as we all hoped it would. But when the poetry is delivered forth by Rabia, a half-life of a thematic memory on the edge of dark waters, the spiritual journey forward feels more real and wanted.

A Poem for Rabia is in need of a tighter distilling of its viewpoint, because as it stands, it feels too broad and overly theatrical, especially in its poetry. It feels land-locked, trapped, and corraled too tightly in the Extraspace at Tarragon behind a clumsy structure that isn’t important enough to wade through. The play is fantastically unique in its planned unpacking, but a sharper, more focused eye would help us all experience and unearth more of what is being shipped to us. The play, in general, is epic and filled with possibilities, like seagulls circling around a big ship hoping to find something to feast upon. The feel-good feast does come, but doesn’t totally deliver the clarity the piece was searching for, feeling overly long and casually driven as it clocks in at two-and-a-half hours. A Poem for Rabia, as tender as it is, could use some precision in its navigation and a bigger pond to float in on, for this captivating piece of theatre to find its footing.

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A Poem for Rabia runs at Tarragon Theatre until November 12. For information and tickets, click here.