In A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain, playwright Sami Ibrahim aims to take the audience through a mythological kingdom where a young woman must wait outside the king’s palace each day to try to be heard on matters of her immigrant status.
Ibrahim, a young writer from London, is the son of a Pakistani immigrant, and ideas about identity and one’s place in society tend to inform much of his work. Theatre performer, writer, and educator Sophia Treanor is the director of the upcoming presentation of A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre. Treanor is from the US but has taught theatre in Shanghai, Vienna, and Madrid.
From these two varying backgrounds, the immigrant, outsider identity of the play’s characters is one Ibrahim and Treanor both understand well. In the production, a young illegal immigrant fleeing an authoritarian regime finds work as a day labourer before getting pregnant. The meat of the play takes place during the 18 years of her child’s life, told in a way that brings the trials of our time, such as climate change and political strife, into a magical world of myth and legend.
“She’s really existing at the intersection of the refugee crisis and climate change,” says Treanor, “and it’s told in a fable, or parable, or mythic way, so the world of the play doesn’t have the same rules of reality as ours does, but the struggle and the bureaucratic burden that she’s facing… It’s based on a British model, but it feels like it could be Canada.”
But it’s not just rooted in the political miasma of immigration policy: Treanor says that the language, imagery, and set design feels like it could be a fairy tale.
“It’s remarkably funny, and devastating. I think that our job is to honour that and bring that out and create an experience for people that allows them the space to laugh at the complete absurdity of the dehumanization of people who are the most vulnerable in our world, and to get a glimpse of what someone who would be made invisible, what their experience is like.”
For Treanor, the casting process of the play helped solidify that this was the right material to be working with and that it was coming at the right time.
“As I was auditioning, I met this really incredible woman who plays the mother, the lead role. Her name is Elif in the play; [the actress’ name is] Divine in real life. She came in with a magnetism and a power and stillness that I was really surprised by. I found it just felt very magical that she showed up for the audition because she’s not even a Performing Arts major.”
Treanor says that the play is bringing a story of our time into a mythological space.
“I am really attempting for that mythological space to be something that allows us to come closer to the truth of the moment instead of framing it as something ‘separate,’ and I hope that the audience feels that their own body and full self is immersed in a very welcome way, into the tenuous circumstance of [the characters in] this play.”
A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain
Various times,
Thursday, February 12
to Saturday, February 21
$18-$34, Phoenix Theatre, UVic
phoenixtheatres.ca