New Play Tuesday is a much-anticipated yearly event at undercurrents, where a number of emerging playwrights have the chance to read works-in-progress to a live (and eager) audience. Three plays were read at undercurrents 2023’s New Play Tuesday: Burnout by Sanita Fejzic, En Sortant de Cochrane by Alain Lauzon, and the featured read of the night, White Lion, Brown Tiger by Vishesh Abeyratne.
Burnout by Sanita Fejzic
Burnout was originally written as part of Fejzic’s Why Worry About Their Futures? The play focuses on a tired conservationist struggling to cope with the trauma of a major wildfire and, more specifically, with the death of Annie, a bear he raised from a cub. The show’s short scenes take place in a therapist’s office, where the reticent conservationist unpacks his loss.
At the core of the play is the equating of ecocide with genocide, a perhaps not-incorrect equation, given the loss of the planet’s biodiversity. The conservationist is quick to point out that governments do not regard animal life as anywhere near equal to human life.
If the play were longer, would it have a satisfying end? In a talkback, Executive Director Alain Richer says it’s not so simple. After all, will increasing rates of natural disasters and climate emergencies have a happy ending?
En Sortant de Cochrane by Alain Lauzon
This documentary theatre piece focuses on playwright Lauzon’s mother’s car crash 18 years ago, the lasting traumatic impact it had on the Lauzon family, and the then-18-year-old Alain (who started university and came out as gay to his parents that same year).
Given Lauzon’s intimacy with the piece—he is playing himself—this is an emotional play, and even the excerpt that Lauzon performed found him with tears in his eyes. Once this play is fully realized, it will no doubt go straight to the audiences’ hearts.
If anything knocked this reading down a peg, it was that the excerpts mainly focused on the meta-theatrical element of Lauzon documenting, on stage, the process of creating his documentary play. Lauzon acts out the phone calls and conversations he has with his mother, father, and family friends. I am excited to see how he brings to life the actual events of the play—if he even does. Ostensibly a play about his mother’s accident, it’s far more about Lauzon’s own healing process.
White Lion, Brown Tiger by Vishesh Abeyratne
The most developed play of the evening, on the surface White Lion, Brown Tiger is a play about the racial tensions between two Sri Lankan men, but on a deeper level asks who in the world, if anyone, is acting in good faith.
The play begins with a fistfight between Lasanta, a Sinhalese man born in Canada, and Rashan, a recent immigrant of Tamil heritage. When their white Canadian store manager Tiffany tries to mediate, the depth of the disagreements between the two—or rather the three—of them comes to light, and seems insurmountable.
Abeyratne’s razor-sharp play is no doubt intended to have the “lily-white liberals” squirming in their seats, but it also doesn’t shy away from the ugly realities of the Sri Lankan civil war. Many plays like to explore the jagged path of multiculturalism in Canada, but few explore the violence between Sri Lankan men of different ethnic groups, languages, and religions, on top of the usual cringe from “well-meaning-but-definitely-not-great” white people. More than just your average “Canada isn’t great at multiculturalism” play, White Lion, Brown Tiger depicts culture clashes at all levels.
Any play that finds one man calling another “brown on the outside, white on the inside” or makes casual jokes about the Tamil Tigers is not going to shy away from controversy, and Abeyratne seems willing to wade into ugly conflict, both in Canada and abroad.
undercurrents runs until Feb.18. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, ranging from $5 to $75. For more information and to purchase tickets, see the undercurrents schedule here.
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