Cricket is a hard sell in Toronto – that much was evident in all the empty seats at Factory Theatre for last night’s performance of The Men in White. But you don’t need to care about cricket – God knows most of us will never understand the rules of the game – to like this play. Philip Akin directs the Factory production of  The Men in White, written by novelist Anosh Irani, who had it first produced in Vancouver, where lots of people care about cricket. The outstanding cast of eight actors – several of them with comedy backgrounds  ̶  give authenticity to a show that earns lots of laughs from lines that are meant to contrast with, but not obscure, some very dark truths.

Hasan (Chanakya Mukherjee) is a poor, uneducated chicken cutter in Dongri, a Muslim neighbourhood of Mumbai (Bombay). He’s employed by an older man called Baba (Huse Madhavji), who is a surrogate father to the young orphaned man as well as his boss in the chicken store. When the lights come up on the Dongri half of the stage, Hasan is trying to make a case for a fan because he can’t bear the flies that surround him on the butcher block. Baba looks up from his newspaper long enough to argue with him. Their repartee is rapid and at first it’s hard to catch every word – dialect coach Isaac Thomas has done his job well – but it’s along the lines of this:

Baba: You want but you don’t know what you need. You need a girl.

Hasan: You’re just an old man who doesn’t want me to succeed.

Baba represents the traditional ways. Why, when he was a young man it was understood, “We did our work; we ate; and then we died.” Hasan in love is very awkward and the running gag about him is his failure to charm the young Haseena (Tahirih Vejdani), whom he adores from a distance. Baba has to nudge him in the right direction, but every time Haseena appears at the shop, Hasan puts his foot in it. Explaining his need for a fan, Hasan says to Haseena, “I wasn’t complaining. Only girls complain.” He’s mortified by his own clumsiness, but can’t seem to get out of his own way.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver – the other half of the stage is the locker room of an amateur cricket team – Hasan’s older brother Abdul (Gugun Deep Singh) is offering a solution to the team’s losing streak. He will bring Hasan, a fantastic player, over from Dongri and they will start winning. Randy (Sugith Varughese) is open to the idea. That’s why he’s called a meeting, attended by Doc (Cyrus Faird), an immigrant who self-identifies as a Zoroastrian, Ram (Farid Yazdani) and Sam (John Chou), the incongruous Chinese member of the team. The repartee between Ram and Sam has the same quality as the Hasan/Baba exchanges. Ram says to Sam, who is nervously banging his shin pads with his cricket bat. “Why are you even playing? You’re Chinese.” Sam, who is better integrated into North American society than some of his teammates, claims to love the game. “That’s not love, that’s fear,” Ram retorts.

Two subplots are carefully integrated into each side of the drama. In Dongri, a menacing biker named Mendi (never actually seen) guns his Harley outside the chicken shop, apparently in pursuit of Haseena. While in Vancouver, Doc gets really nasty with Abdul because Doc hates Muslims. Randy tries to show Doc that his bigotry has no place on this team, a microcosm of multicultural Vancouver.

It’s in the progression of the main plot and the merging of the subplots that a truly shocking denouement occurs at the climax of the play.

Akin has staged The Men in White with aplomb, and the actors infuse their characters with very credible personalities. It’s too bad as good an actor as Huse Madhavji has to be made up to look old, which he isn’t, because he’s otherwise a very credible Baba. He and Randy act like the consciences of the other characters. Steve Lucas’s set and lighting are effective as is Waleed Abdulhamid’s sound design.

You won’t know anything more about cricket than you did when came to see
The Men in White, but you’ll have learned a lesson in the complexities of exile and adopting a new homeland.

The Men in White

By Anosh Irani

Directed by Philip Akin

At Factory Theatre, Toronto, until November 4

Photo by Joseph Michael. From left, Huse Madhavji as Baba, Tahirih Vejdani as Haseena and Chanakya Mukherjee as Hasan