Written & Performed by Anusree Roy
Directed by Thomas Morgan Jones

To see an 'A News' interview with Anusree Roy, Pyaasa playwright and actor, please click here.

One woman’s journey from childhood to adulthood in India will soon take the McManus Studio Theatre stage.
Set in Calcutta, India, Pyaasa explores the issues surrounding the caste system – a discriminatory form of social stratification into which every Hindu is born. At the bottom of this hierarchy is the “untouchable” sect, a group which is seen as sub-human by the members of the Hindu caste system. Pyaasa tells the story of 11-year old, Chaya as she learns the realities of an “untouchable”’s life.

Pyaasa playwright and performer Anusree Roy says sharing this way of life was important to her.
“Being born and raised in a culture and community where untouchability persists into the 21st century, I feel that it is my moral responsibility to bring this daunting issue to the stage. Even though the caste system was abolished in India years ago, it is still a part of the Indian way of life. I was raised in a household where our “toilet cleaner” came in every week to do his job. Though we pretended not to watch him, we ensured that his shadow never fell on us since that would supposedly demean our caste.”

“Writing this play was an emotional journey for me, forcing me to confront both personal and social issues, while dealing with subject matter that is tremendously sensitive. While recognizing my social location in the system I would hope that this play gives a voice to the unheard and creates a dialogue about an issue that is still prevalent in India today.”

PYAASA Reviews

Giving voice to India’s Untouchables
PAULA CITRON
Globe and Mail Update
October 30, 2008 at 4:30 AM EST
Written and performed by Anusree Roy
Directed by Thomas Morgan Jones
At Theatre Passe Muraille Back Space in Toronto

Pyaasa, written and performed by Anusree Roy, won 2007 Dora Awards for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Performance, Female. How astute of Theatre Passe Muraille to bring back the one-woman show as part of its Fall Festival of Four Plays.

On one level, Pyaasa is a soap opera in the grand tradition so beloved by South Asian filmmakers. But Roy is careful to avoid mawkish sentiment by portraying real people with guts and sinew. Her characters may be victims, but they are also feisty as hell.

Pyaasa means thirst in Hindi, which at the most basic level can be seen as a metaphor for the very struggle for survival. Every character is thirsting after something. Her key protagonists are a mother and daughter, Untouchables who inhabit the lowest level of the Hindu caste system. The family are toilet cleaners who live in a leaky plastic tent under a bridge.

Eleven-year-old Chaya wants to go to school and has, in fact, had some education. She tries to keep her mind alert by remembering the multiplication tables. However, school is out of the question. Her mother wrangles her a job washing cups at a tea stall. The main goal is to marry Chaya off at the earliest opportunity.

Roy’s most memorable creation is the mother herself. Knowing her place, she grovels before her betters with stomach-churning obsequiousness. She does, however, have cunning to spare and the tenacity of a pit bull when going after what she wants. For example, her relentless wearing-down of the resolve of a servant at one of the houses that she cleans is masterful. That servant is the mother of the tea-stall owner.

In both physicality and voice, Roy is a charismatic performer. She has the capacity to transform her entire body before our eyes as the various characters appear. She can even function brilliantly within characters themselves. We know exactly when the mother is cowering in the presence of others, or raging when she is in her own thoughts.

Director Thomas Morgan Jones has skillfully directed Roy around an empty set with only a large pail as a prop. How and when this pail is carried, and by whom, is part and parcel of character delineation. In fact, the pail tends to take on more significance as the play progresses. Jones has also ensured clarity between character transformations, as well as the rapid switch between the Hindi and English text.

It was only after immigrating to Canada that Roy was consumed with shame over how she had treated Untouchables. In her program notes, she remembers the toilet cleaner of her own home.

Roy comments on how Untouchables have to be careful not to let their shadows fall on upper-caste people because this stains the person and must be ritually removed. (Shadows do appear in Pyaasa.)

Even though the caste system is outlawed in India, it still remains entrenched like a dirty secret.

This truism is at the heart of Pyaasa, but rather than have the play just be a treatise on the evils of the caste system, Roy wants to give a voice to these marginalized people. Pyaasa is a poignant, character-driven play about survival, where even the Untouchables victimize their own.

Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace

The principal characters of Pyaasa live in a tent under a bridge in Calcutta. There is Meera, who cleans the toilets in the house of a wealthy woman; her husband, whom we hear of but never actually meet and who performs the same function in a police station; and their daughter, Chaya.

Chaya reads a lot and is eager for an education, tendencies that her mother deems socially inadvisable. The family are Untouchables, the lowest of the low. The caste system was officially banned in India in 1950 but seems too hard-wired into Hindu tradition to have disappeared.

Besides, too many people have a stake in it. Anyone concerned with the evils bred of religion can add this to their list.

The play, which lasts 45 minutes, was written by Anusree Roy, who plays all the roles. Anyone wary of one-person shows can leave their fears at the door. Apart from a brief tendency to ramble, somewhere in the first third, this is a taut, inexorable piece of work, superbly performed. It starts with Roy squatting on the ground, in what looks like an attitude of hopelessness. She rouses herself and partakes in a scene, funny in a barbed way, between Meera and a superior servant in the same household, whom she differentiates through instant changes in voice and stance. One inclines haughtily downwards, the other demurely cowers while also, you feel, keeping her own ironic counsel. When Meera makes the mistake of actually looking at her antagonist, the latter complains that now she’ll have to take a shower to wash away the uncleanness of it. Interestingly, the mistress of the house, when we finally meet her, doesn’t seem especially concerned with this. She seems to regard Meera simply as a source of dirt-cheap labour, to be dismissed if ever she steps out of line. It’s the middle orders who cling to the system, compensating for their own economic dependence by despising those even worse off than themselves. It’s a familiar pattern, but Roy, by stating it firmly but lightly, brings it freshly home.

Meera herself has a certain psychic investment in her own status; in her own mind, she can avenge herself by “letting her shadow fall” on someone who’s offended her. That same acceptance becomes rather less amusing when she tries to pass the oppression on to her own daughter, telling her that her only hope in life is to marry the right man, which seems to mean any who’ll have her. As usual, the road to disaster is paved with the very best intentions. Meera
secures Chaya a job at a tea stall run by her employer’s son. Chaya is dazzled; she’s never even tasted tea before. “Pyaasa” is a Hindi word meaning thirst, and Chaya has been, in several senses, parched. She falls into a trap, centuries old but newly baited by those she has most reason to trust. The play develops as a miniature tragedy, with a conclusion that draws on tradition even as it condemns it.

Roy’s physical control is extraordinary; so is her empathy. She’s able to switch instantly, and with total conviction, from gnarled mother to joyous child. She might be playing Juliet and the Nurse simultaneously. With a bare set, and David DeGrow’s precision lighting, Thomas Morgan Jones’ production gives the actress-author everything she needs. She gives everything in return. This is a rare kind of protest drama. It goes beyond anger.

There are two qualities which can’t be valued highly enough when it comes to doing a one-person show: simplicity and honesty.

Pyaasa, which opened Friday at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, has both of those in abundance.

Anusree Roy, who wrote and performs this powerful work, is already, at a very young age, a master of how to communicate maximum emotion with minimum resources and do it all in 40 minutes.

On a bare stage, with no complex props or costumes and only the wonderfully understated lighting of David DeGrow to help tell us where we are, Roy shows us an entire world and some of the tortured people who live within it.

Her central character is an 11-year-old girl in Calcutta who is part of the untouchable caste. Her mother earns her meagre living cleaning toilets and feels she has made a major step forward when she convinces the woman she works for to have her son hire the young girl to work in his tea shop.

The joy of someone seeing her first sunrise creases Roy’s face as she sets out on her job, carefully washing the vessels the tea is served in and cherishing the biscuit she is given at the end of the day.

But happiness is not the state that those in her caste are meant to live in and all the fragile threads that have held her family’s tentative existence together crumble one by one in a short and brutal time.

The strength of Roy’s performing is the same as her writing: the specificity of emotion. She isn’t writing a political document or a social diatribe. She’s telling the story of one sweet, innocent soul and how it is brutally destroyed.

Roy slips from role to role with ease but somehow never seems glib, and it’s only very rarely that her accent makes it difficult to understand exactly what she’s saying.

Even then, her wondrously mobile face comes to the rescue, making it clear what is going on inside her characters’ minds.

Pyaasa means “thirst” and the physical, emotional and spiritual thirst that drives these people makes them unforgettable.

Roy is a writer and a performer you should get to know. Her work may speak from a particularly South Asian place, but it delivers a universal message.

Last season, Anusree Roy won Dora Awards for writing and acting in her solo show Pyaasa, and it’s easy to see why in this mainstage remount. Her script is direct and passionate, and her performance is spine-tinglingly alive and confident.

The brief play focuses on Chaya, a young girl in India’s untouchables caste who lives in extreme poverty under a bridge with her family. She wants to attend school but is forced by her mother into working in a tea stall, where she comes up against abuse and injustice for the smallest offence.

The tragic tale is Dickensian in feel, and if the characters are a touch too saintly or evil, Roy the performer infuses them with an energy that makes them memorable. There’s as much humour as pathos here, and Roy’s smile could light up a city block.

Guided by director/dramaturge Thomas Morgan Jones, Roy is especially effective in morphing from one character to the next. So completely does she become Chaya’s stooped-over, put-upon mother that you’ll feel a pain in your back leaving the theatre.

The production is superb. There’s a minimal set, but David DeGrow’s eerily atmospheric lighting helps conjure up several very different worlds – a tea stall, a jail, a trip to get clean water – on the intimate Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace stage.

Opening Theatre Passe Muraille’s “Festival of Four Plays” is Pyaasa by Anusree Roy. Though it ran for only a week in September last year, it deservedly won Dora Awards for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Performance. Though only 45 minutes long, the play gains its power through the utter simplicity of its presentation and through the outstanding performance of Roy as multiple characters.

Pyaasa (meaning “thirsty” in Hindi) is a strong indictment of the caste system in India. Though discrimination on the basis of caste was outlawed in the Indian Constitution of 1950, it still remains a pervasive force in Indian society. This is the story of a mother and daughter who are members of the lowest caste, the “untouchables,” considered so impure as to be subhuman. As Roy demonstrates, there are still higher-caste persons who fear even to have the shadow of an untouchable fall on them, since it will make them “unclean.” Roy’s story focuses on a mother, Meera, and her daughter, Chaya, whose home is a leaky plastic tent under a bridge. Meera cleans toilets and makes cow dung patties for fuel for her upper-caste employer. Chaya reads any book that comes her way even though her mother warns that education will only hinder her already limited chances for marriage. Meera begs her employer to give Chaya a job at a local tea stall, but her happiness is short-lived. The brutality of Chaya’s passage from childhood to adulthood is tragic and deeply affecting.

This stark tale is staged appropriately on a bare stage with the only prop a pail of water, which symbolizes subsistence and cleanness. David DeGrow’s precise blocks of light take the place of a set. Roy’s ability to transform herself from the prematurely aged Meera to the vital young Chaya is so magical you can hardly believe both are played by the same person. Her depiction of Chaya’s ultimate loss of hope is devastating. Roy and director Thomas Morgan Jones need do no more than allow the action to speak for itself. If you missed Pyaasa last year, don’t miss it now.

First-rate play takes rare look at India’s caste system
Adrian Chamberlain
Times Colonist
Published: Friday, May 22, 2009
Rating: 4 (out of 5)

This fine play examines a rarely examined subject with great skill and heart. The final performance is Sunday — I encourage you to forsake the gardening-trowel/bicycle/kayak to check out this little gem.

Toronto’s Anusree Roy, 27, won two Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Pyaasa, her one-woman show about an 11-year-old member of India’s untouchable caste. Chaya’s a bright young thing who hungers for knowledge (pestering her mom to quiz her on arithmetic tables) and capers with a coltish vivacity encapsulating childhood’s joy and innocence.

Sadly, her lot in life is predetermined. The tyranny of the caste system curbs her budding interest in boys. We see that as an untouchable, Chaya is used and terribly abused. The best her mother can do for Chaya is finding her a job washing cups at a tea stall — a crime, especially given the girl’s obvious intelligence and charm.

What makes this 45-minute play a superior offering is Roy’s first-rate performance, beautifully directed by Thomas Morgan Jones. There’s a wonderful musicality in both her movements and delivery, which work to make Pyaasa a powerful visual poem. She possesses sufficient stage presence to fill the Metro Studio, a large venue for a one-person show.

Roy is especially clever at shifting from one character to another in a split-second, be it Chaya, her mother or a horrible employer who insists untouchables keep their distance lest their shadows touch her. My only criticism (as a middle-class white guy) is that her accent, deliberately thickened for the performance, occasionally makes the dialogue hard to follow.

On Wednesday, Roy held a brief Q&A period following the show. If she offers it again Sunday, it’s worth staying for. She explained how her upper-middle class family (big house, three cars, servants) immigrated to Canada nine years ago. In this country, Roy and her family experienced racial discrimination — especially after the 9/11 attacks.

This reminded Roy of how she had discriminated against low-caste servants back in India. She returned to her homeland to visit, and apologized to one 60-year-old servant for treating him harshly. He accepted her money gift … but not her apology.

Roy then realized there are some things an apology cannot fix.

“He made me go, ‘No, it’s not that easy.’ ”

Still, with the eloquent and touching Pyaasa, one suspects the playwright/actor has more than made amends.