‘The Caged Bird Sings’ was great when it debuted in Toronto outdoors. Performed indoors at Tarragon, the play loses its magic

The production has undergone several other transformations as well. When it premiered in 2024, “The Caged Bird Sings” was presented in-the-round in the Aga Khan Museum’s spacious courtyard. Now, this polished remount is running indoors in a far smaller and more traditional proscenium venue. 

But something has been lost in this latest round of metamorphosis. Whereas the show’s original outdoor setting offered the text room to breathe, this indoor iteration now feels — much like the bird in its title — stifled and confined to a cage. 

The play’s narrative remains largely unchanged from two years ago. Its central story is drawn from the opening parable in “Masnavi,” about a king (played by Silogix) who falls in love with a slave and lavishes riches upon her, only to later discover that his love is unrequited. 

A secondary, interrelated narrative follows Rumi (Mikaela Lily Davies) and Jin (Navtej Sandhu), two scientists and lovers who mysteriously find themselves locked in prison with the king — unaware of how they ended up there, or how to escape. 

As “The Caged Bird Sings” unfolds, it reveals itself to be a gorgeously surrealist drama. The cage in which the three characters find themselves is not so much physical as psychological: the king can’t break free from his love for his slave, just as Rumi and Jin are shackled to their turbulent relationship with each other.

Silogix, Mahmud and Lakhani’s writing is similarly surrealist in style and tone. They constantly tinker and blur both time and place, peppering their script with sly anachronisms. There’s also an irreverent edge to the proceedings: The play is broken into three parts, and each scene is given cheeky subtitles, such as “Rum-eo and Jiniet” or “Waiting for Godot’s Due Process.” 

Mahmud, who directs this production, adequately stages the action in Tarragon’s somewhat cramped Extraspace studio venue. Waleed Ansari’s simple set consists of several Persian rugs, two beds and a canopy that frames the jail cell in which the king, Rumi and Jin are imprisoned. Arun Srinivasan’s lighting designs, washing over the stage like streams of rushing water cresting over a cliff, are particularly striking. 

But not everything in this remount is an improvement over the 2024 run. While Davies has only deepened her portrayal, imbued with a quiet, aching gravitas, Sandhu and Silogix’s performances are too demonstrative, and at times shouty, as if they were still acting in a larger, arena-type setting. 

This leaves the production feeling heavy, even somewhat sluggish — and it’s a weight that the skeleton of this light, poetic work can’t always support. It also makes some of the flaws of this stage adaptation more apparent, particularly an overlong third section which deviates from the central narrative and dramatizes other short stories from “Masnavi.” 

One of these ancillary parables is that from which the play gets its name, about a parrot who learns to break free from her master’s cage. But much like that bird, and like the king, Rumi and Jin, this production of “The Caged Bird Sings” still feels like a prisoner in its own cell, still waiting to learn how to break free.