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Oy! Just Beat It! Play Review | Toronto Fringe Festival
By Manori RavindranAnita Majumdar is breathless as she tells the audience at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre that Oy! Just Beat It! has been selected as a "Best of the Fringe" pick. Majumdar is dressed in a red jacket, similar to Michael Jackson's in "Thriller," and stands beaming with Leon Aureus by her side. The pair has capped off their final performance of Oy! for the Toronto Fringe Festival with a side-splitting dance-off to Jackson's "Beat It."
Majumdar and Aureus star as Kabira and Felipe. In 1989, the pair meets one evening in a studio in India to record songs for an upcoming Bollywood film in which actors lip synch to their tracks. Kabira is a young Indian woman set to marry in four days while Felipe is an Indo-Filipino singer saving up to return to the Philippines. Singing is a way out of unhappy situations for both: The only problem is, in the competitive Bollywood film industry, looks are everything, and Kabira and Felipe are all sorts of shades wrong.
Written by Majumdar, Oy! Just Beat It! is an arena where characters discuss race, identity, and skin colour. Focusing primarily on shadism and internalized racism, the play has a take-home message that is more than just a laughing matter.
Shadism is the belief in a colour hierarchy where lighter, whiter skin is superior to dark skin. Kabira is a character bitterly struggling inside her skin, while harbouring prejudices against other people of colour.
Majumdar, who grew up in Canada, was glaringly aware of skin colour from an early age. She believes her own desire for fair skin was passed down from her mother and observed from idealized representations of beauty in Bollywood. The problem, she explains, extends beyond Asia: "Whenever I've gone to India, I've been stunned by the skin whitening cream commercials. As a child, I naively thought that this was an 'Indian' desire, an 'Indian' issue. But I think about the little comments that were made by parents and family friends in Canada about how dark so-and-so's new wife was...this was 'normal' conversation that I grew up with."
These observations about shadism also prompted Majumdar to set the play in 1989. "1989 to me represents the time when India was in talks with American corporations like Pepsi who soon pumped their products into India throughout the nineties," says Majumdar. "In my opinion, the Americanization of India is a kind of new colonialism."
The omnipresence of American products also set a standard for Indians who came to believe that if they appeared fairer, the power and status of Americans could also be theirs. These notions are manifest in Kabira, who dreams of a life in America where she can style her hair "like Farah Fawcett" and bathe her children in Johnson & Johnson bath products.
Interestingly, Felipe, who has experienced both India and America, wants little to do with either country. "In the U.S. they're really funny about skin colour," he tells Kabira. Of the two, Felipe has a nuanced understanding of race: Kabira's disdain for her "dark" skin bewilders him, as he sees a person and not a colour.
Majumdar promises that her dialogue will continue in the 2010-2011 season when the play will evolve into a two-act production. Aisha 'n' Ben will follow Kabira's daughter Aisha and a Filipino-Canadian back-up dancer named Ben as they continue their predecessors' conversation about race and skin colour.
Oy! Just Beat It! surpasses the veneer of intercultural romantic comedy and unerringly embodies a century's issues about race and identity that are more than skin-deep. Ultimately, by exploring these conflicts through comedy, Oy! may just be the one to beat at "Best of the Fringe."
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July 16, 2010 at 11:26 PM
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