Playwright: Aditi Brennan Kapil. At: About Face Theatre and Silk Road Rising at Chicago Temple, 77 W. Washington St. Tickets: 312-857-1234; www.aboutfacetheatre.com or www.silkroadrising.org; $20-$35. Runs through: April 27
New About Face Theatre artistic director Andrew Volkoff is certainly making a bold statement for his Chicago directorial debut with the local premiere of Aditi Brennan Kapil's Brahman/i: A One-Hijra Stand Up Comedy Show.
This smart collaboration with Silk Road Rising tackles an underrepresented group within the extended LGBTQIA community. ( The "I" in the acronym stands for intersex, meaning people physically born with both sets of male and female genitalia. ) The show also serves to expound upon the dualities faced by a person of Indian descent growing up and living in America.
The show's format as an extended stand-up comedy routine is also unconventional, so one can't accuse Volkoff of neglecting any of the diversity boxes when it comes to checking off categories of gender, sexuality, minority cultures or theatrical forms.
Thankfully, Brahman/i works wonderfully as a theater piece that also delivers loads of laughs. Volkoff was very lucky to get actor Fawzia Mirza to bravely tackle the lengthy title role, since she nimbly handles its comedy demands with lots of skill and panache.
Brahman/i focuses on an American of Indian descent sharing the struggles of being a "Hijra" ( a Hindi word for Intersex person ) from childhood ambitions to be popular in school to being faced with nearly a dozen choices on how to live one's life after puberty sets the course of the body's development. Mirza masterfully delivers Kapil's intelligently inserted punch lines tied to Indian vs. American cultures, plus lots of history to help root her main character's views on colonialism and cultural imperialism.
Mirza is backed up by a laconic bassist identified as "J" ( a very supportive Damian Conrad ), and she straddles the gender divide of the title character well in designer Jeremy W. Floyd's costumes that emphasize male and female sides.
Yet not everything works. There is an extended comic sequence about Stonehenge that is meant to trash Britons that Mirza hasn't mastered. ( Perhaps she needs to find better British accents or work on the timing to make it comedy gold. ) I also wonder if set designer Roger Wykes might have been wiser to reconfigure the basement space into an actual comedy club complete with cabaret tables and chairs. The current configuration is fine, but Silk Road Rising's past musical revues have shown what else can be done in its theater.
But on the whole, Brahman/i entertains as much as it educates. This makes Brahman/i quite the illuminating comedy, and it bodes very well for Volkoff's artistic stewardship of About Face Theatre for the future.