I don’t think I’ve ever read a more detailed and exhaustive trigger warning than the one for “Trident Moon,” which opened Friday in a Crow’s Theatre production.
The play includes content that may be disturbing including depictions of death, as well as physical and sexual violence toward women and children. This production also includes the use of prop guns, simulated gunfire, strong language, discussions of rape, torture, murder, decapitation and derogatory language describing a character with a disability. Sensory advisories include flashing lights, theatrical haze, fog and loud noises.
This laundry list of a content advisory is certainly warranted. And yet, it still feels wholly insufficient. For nothing can quite prepare you for this Crow’s and National Arts Centre co-production.
Anusree Roy’s historical drama offers a brutally painful account of the 1947 partition of India. It sanitizes nothing, gripping you by the collar from its opening scene and holding you there for 90 minutes straight.
When the lights rise on Jawon Kang’s set, we find ourselves inside the back of a cramped, squalid transport truck. Romeo Candido’s sound designs, enveloping the audience, evoke the truck’s rubber tires digging into the road below, the sound of other vehicles incessantly whizzing by.
Inside sit six women, faces marked with terror. They’re heading, we learn, out of the region that will soon become Pakistan and into the Hindu-majority India.
Roy’s story feels like a mystery thriller. Three of the truck’s occupants are Hindu and they’re holding the other trio of women, all Muslim, as captives. Where exactly they’re heading isn’t initially apparent, nor are the circumstances that led to this point.
The playwright (who also portrays Alo, one of the Hindu women) has said the drama is inspired by oral histories passed down through her family.
Indeed, it’s clear that Roy penned “Trident Moon” with a steely reverence to history. Not once do you question whether the events depicted in the play are each drawn from kernels of truth.
It’s also admirable that Roy has chosen to focus her play on women and children. One of the recurring themes in “Trident Moon” is how these characters are forced to live with — or, in some cases, rebel against — the decisions made by the men in their lives.
But where “Trident Moon” falls short is in its character development. The story jumps so hastily from one dramatic (sometimes gory and violent, too) incident to the next that it rarely has a chance to settle and breathe.
By the end of Roy’s roller-coaster of a play we’re barely any more acquainted with these six women than when we first met them. Worse yet, for a show that tries to highlight the resiliency of its characters, too many come across as passive victims, lacking agency.
The more rounded characters are actually those we meet along the way. Sonali (Zorana Sadiq), an incessantly talkative Sikh woman who’s pregnant with twins, forces herself onto the truck after convincing Alo to let her in, knowing it’s her only way to safety. She’s akin to the Shakespearean fool in this drama, bringing much of the comic relief but also a preternatural wisdom that she lends to the narrative.
The women are subsequently joined by another two characters: a 12-year-old named Munni (Michelle Mohammed) and Sumaiya (Afroza Banu), a mercurial figure who claims to be the girl’s grandmother.
Despite the density of this drama, director Nina Lee Aquino stages the play with clarity, drawing poignant performances out of the 10-person ensemble. Especially strong are Roy, Sadiq and, in an underwritten role, Muhaddisah as Pari, one of the Muslim women held captive by Alo and her family.
Muhaddisah, in particular, silent for much of the play, manages to communicate so much through a longing glance, a fierce look of determination streaked across her face.
When the writing doesn’t entirely succeed, it’s performances like these that help to elevate the material — showing, ultimately, that despite all the trauma and the pain, there exists too for these women a sense of dignity. They’re riding off into an uncertain future, but at least with their pride intact.
