Theater Review—

‘Agnes Under the Big Top’ Full Of Explosive Talent

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — Quite a few years ago I got into a limited conversation with a shy, quiet woman who used to live on our street. The conversation was limited because she was Asian, and spoke very little English. Normally our encounters consisted of standard pleasantries, but on this occasion her face was screwed up with unexpected frustration and anguish.

What she finally managed to convey was that she worked as a kitchen aide in a nursing home, and was unable to apply for any kind of promotion because her command of the language was so bad. In her country, she burst out, she had been a teacher of mathematics. Here she felt like she was trapped in the brain of a five year old.

The diminished sense of self experienced by many immigrants is the theme of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s complex and meticulously crafted “tall tale,” Agnes Under the Big Top, which just wrapped its world premiere at Long Wharf Theatre.

Using a pair of central metaphors (a vast subway system and a circus), the play is a series of brief episodes in which five characters, each embittered, daunted, and fearful, repeatedly meet and briefly interact, gradually summoning up the courage to take steps toward growth and change.

Dominating the New Haven production in a dazzling performance was Francesca Choy-Kee as Agnes, a self-described party girl, who left Liberia eight years earlier to earn enough money to support and educate her young son, Eugene, who is being raised by his grandmother. In the opening scene the off-stage voice of an oncologist breaks the bad news that her inoperable cancer is terminal. She has only months, perhaps weeks, to live.

From there she heads for her job as a home care attendant for Ella, a bedridden elderly woman who spends her days lamenting into the answering machine of her son’s phone. Agnes shares the job in shifts with Roza, a depressed Bulgarian woman who speaks no English, communicating only with the birds whom she feeds through an opened window, much to Ella’s disgust.

The play was anchored by Michael Cullen as  Roza’s husband, Shipkov, a blustering bear of a man who was a circus ringmaster in Bulgaria, but now operates a subway train. He snarls contemptuously at Happy, the young Indian trainee assigned to accompany him in the driver’s booth, played by Eshan Bay.

In Bulgaria he held audiences in the palm of his hand, while he directed every aspect of the performance. Here he stands at the front of an automated train, run by computers, as it hurtles through darkened tunnels, while stations flash by with lifeless faces waiting on platforms.

While the vision of strangers in the subway cloaked in their carefully composed, self-protective anonymity serves as an image of the immigrants who fill menial jobs around us, the device of the recorded transit announcements is used to provide flashbacks to the lives left behind. An automated voice warns us to step back from the track as the number two train departs for Monrovia or Mumbai or Sofia. Suddenly the characters are seen in their younger, fuller, more expansive selves as they discuss their hopes and plans for coming to America.

A series of arbitrary encounters trigger the events of the plot, such as it is. Agnes recognizes a drunken woman staggering on the subway platform as Roza. Although they have never spoken before, she guides her to the room where Shipkov is taking his break. He identifies Roza as his wife, who drinks because her life has become so circumscribed, then goes into a rant about a troupe of aerialists climbing the ladder to their trapezes, when one of them panicked and begged to climb back down.

“I wouldn’t let him,” Shipkov tells Agnes. “I took the ladder away. You have to find the courage to make the leap.”

The telephone is another ubiquitous symbol in the play. Back in Mumbai, Happy worked in an AT&T call center, trying to sell long-distance plans to Americans. His chance call to Ella (effectively played by Laura Esterman,) triggers a fragile connection between them, that is at least more meaningful than her relationship with the son, who never calls back.

Agnes, determined to be the best mother she can to Eugene, calls him weekly, with exhortations to work hard in school, and rewarding him only rarely with the folk tales and fables that he loves. But how do you say goodbye over the phone? How can she tell anyone, the grim secret she is carrying?

Under Eric Ting’s direction, Agnes Under the Big Top was provocative, moving, and at times unclear, like the jokes which don’t translate well from one culture to another, reflecting a world in which not everything is understood. As Roza, Gergana Mellin speaks at first in Bulgarian, before she ultimately takes the risk of trying to explain her unhappiness. The acting was superb, leading you to care deeply for these people who might have been so easy to ignore when we see them on the job, or in transit.

Long Wharf’s traditional staging was as innovative and remarkable as ever, using strobe lights, signage and metal structures to convince the most hardened New Yorker that you are in the depths of the New York City subway system, even as moving parts suddenly transform sections into an upper West Side apartment.

This was definitely a chance to see the product of an explosive new talent. Aditi Brennan Kapil is a half-Indian, half-Bulgarian woman, raised in Sweden and educated in Minnesota, who combines creative stagecraft with compassionate insight. The playwright has already won a lot of prizes. She definitely deserves them.