THEATRE REVIEW: MAHMOUD
6 MAR/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3 out of 5

It’s not easy to create a work of theatre that can be all things to all people, so right off the top fledgling playwright/performer Tara Grammy deserves a nod for creating a piece of theatre that successfully leaps a few cultural hurdles. In a new work, titled MAHMOUD, young Grammy and her collaborators at Pandemic Theatre give us a 50-minute playlet that apparently speaks evocatively to the experiences of first and second generation Iranian Canadians (in whose number Grammy counts herself), even while it opens windows into those experiences for a broader theatrical audience. MAHMOUD opened Friday at the Tarragon Extra Space.

It is, in the main, the handiwork of Grammy herself, who not only wrote the work in collaboration with director/dramaturg Tom Arthur Davis, but performs in it as well, essaying all three of the characters they have created to bring the work to life. The first of those characters, and the one who ties them all together in the end, is Mahmoud, a garrulous affable sort who has been making his living as a Toronto taxi driver for the past 25 years, even while he dreams of his homeland and his life there as a successful engineer. These days, he finds not only comfort and wisdom in the poetry of Hafez and the engineering genius of Toyota, but also the time and energy to keep his needy wife happy too.

Young Tara, the second character, has dreams of her homeland too, at least when she’s not dreaming of playing Tinkerbell in her school’s production of Peter Pan, or conspiring to catch the eye of a high school jock who has already caught hers. To her, Iran is a glorious place where she might be able to simply be herself.

The third character is a young gay Spaniard named Emanuelos who, at first blush, might appear to have absolutely nothing to do with the ex-pat Persian community, beyond a shared immigrant experience, of course. But like the two characters with whom he shares the stage, he is about to discover that Persian roots run deep — and that what anchors so many people can also serve to hold them back.

As a performer, Grammy has a definite facility with character roles, but under Davis’ direction — even with an assist from consulting director Soheil Parsa — she still struggles with separating character from caricature. Even while they are revealing wonderful little nuggets about their individual and shared experiences, her characters feel a little too much like mere amalgams of clichés, strung together merely for entertainment purposes.

So, when the action suddenly turns serious and leads us into the tumult of the Green revolution, that first zephyr that has grown into the winds of change currently sweeping through the Middle East, her characters are, in the main, utterly incapable of shouldering the emotional demands with which they are faced. Still one suspects that those familiar with the Iranian-Canadian experience will see at least some of their lives reflected on stage, even while outsiders enjoy a glimpse into the complexities of living with a foot in two worlds.