“I’m an immigrant born of immigrant parents. The shifting identities, the multiple languages sifting every thought, the disconnect from family history are inescapable parts of how I think and see the world."
Aditi Brennan Kapil
Aditi Brennan Kapil is a playwright, actress, and director of Bulgarian and Indian descent. Born in Bulgaria, she grew up in Sweden before moving to Minnesota to attend Macalaster College, where she studied Dramatic Arts and English. Following school, Kapil was a working actress in the Twin Cities, later becoming a director, and lastly a playwright with the completion of her first one-act play The Deaf Duckling. Kapil's work often focuses on her unique experience of being born an immigrant to immigrant parents (her father is East Indian and her mother is Bulgarian) and how these cultures, languages, histories and identities can conflict with one another. She cites her influences coming from her multiple ethnic identities and is an amalgamation of Indian magical realism, Slavic realism, American naturalism, and "Swedish sensibility for magic."
Working both domestically and internationally, Kapil has had plays commissioned from Yale Repetory Theater (Imogen Says Nothing), South Coast Repertory Theatre (Orange), Mixed Blood Theatre (The Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy, Agnes Under the Big Top, and Love Person), and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a playwright-in-residence at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, an artistic associate at Park Square Theatre, a core writer at The Playwrights' Center, and a Resident Writer at New Dramatists.
Kapil currently resides in Minneapolis with her husband and three children.
Agnes is a story that craftily blends the intersecting lives of multiple immigrants living in an unnamed American city. The action centers itself around Agnes, a Liberian home-care worker with terminal cancer who has immigrated to the United States in order to pay for her son’s schooling back in her home country. Other characters include Ella, a bedridden elderly American women desperate to communicate with her distant son; Shipkov, a Bulgarian subway operator and former circus ringmaster; Roza, Shipkov’s wife and Agnes’ co-worker who turns mute living in the US; Happy, an Indian call center escapee with financial difficulties that is hard-pressed to earn money and ultimately turns to conning; and an omnipresent, shape-shifting Busker who leaps through time and space with the characters and revisits their past lives and identities. Kapil uses the medley of characters to reflect on how re-contextualizing ourselves in new locations alters our identity and self-image.
In a Social Studies or ELA classroom this play can be used to look at the multiple immigration waves throughout American history, those currently ongoing, and the many micro and macro challenges within the immigrant experience including marginalization, alienation, financial difficulties, homesickness, trauma, and language / communication barriers. Additionally it could be used to scrutinize widely accepted concepts such as "The American Dream" and "The Melting Pot."
Activity: Lost in Translation: An Immigrant Simulation Activity
Grade Level: 9-12 Grade
Location: ELA or Social Studies
Objectives:
1. Reflect on personal emotions of feeling like an outsider
2. Recognize new Americans feelings and experience
3. Empathize with immigrants who experience alienation and isolation living in new land
Procedure:
Modifications:
Love Person is a four part love story in Sanskrit, ASL and English in which love transcends sexual orientation, physical attraction, and social structure, and rests instead on the ways in which we communicate and how communication bonds or breaks us. The play is structured around four Sanskrit love poems that influence and reflect the journeys of the characters. Free, a deaf woman in a relationship with Maggie, accidentally falls into a deceptive email correspondence with her sister Vic's love interest Ram, a Sanskrit professor. Free and Ram discover a connection, based largley on an affinity between their two languages. As a result of the deception, Vic and Ram also begin to fall in love. Meanwhile Free and Maggie's relatipnship struggles to survive.
This play could be beautifully utilized in a ELA or Drama classroom, or more specifically a linguistics class or American Sigh Language course, to spark conversations on communication barriers between different languages and social issues related to ableism and the deaf experience. Furthermore, it could be used to explore in greater detail the structure and ancient history of Sanskrit and its wide influence on other languages around the world from Latin to English. In addition to reading the play, students could read translated excerpts from renowned epics The Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata to explore the content of the work but also the challenges and limitations of translations as argued by the character Ram.
Based on the myth of Hindu god Shiva, the god of destruction, this play centers itself on Shiv, a young Indian girl, her father, Bapu, a struggling modernist poet, and their struggle to find stability as immigrants in America. With a non-linear narrative structure and drawing from Indian magical realism, this play jumps back and forth through time by means of a magical mattress, with Shiv as a young girl living with her parents, and as a young adult working as a home care worker at a summer resort. Seen as a “post-colonial play” it investigates the colonization of India by the West and its social, political, cultural, and personal ramifications. Shiv’s struggle is deeply rooted in the belief that her life is the product of foregone opportunities and a looted civilization therefore causing her to steal to save her family and culture's reputation.
In a history classroom this play could be supplemental to learning of Indian history (and other regions of the world that we victims of European colonization like the Middle East, Latin America and Africa) and its many contributions to philosophy, medicine, science, poetry, art, and technology in juxtaposition with a Eurocentric lens. Considered by Kapil herself to be a "Post-Colonial Play", students could use this play to discuss "The Great Divergence" including the aftermath of colonization for much of the developing world and the challenges that were faced to find economic and political stability. Furthermore, it could lead to conversations on historiography, ushering students to critically think about bias and/or political motivations in historical texts through examining wide-ranging perspectives.
Love Person (2008)
Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale (2011)
The Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy
Imogen Says Nothing (2017)
Orange (2017)
The Deaf Duckling (2005)
Circus Kalashnikov (2006)
The Courbet Cure (2006)
The Adventures of Hanuman, King of the Monkeys (2006)
Buck the Rider (2007)
Messy Utopia, the Ballad of Accountant Jo (2007)
Hanuman and the Girl Prince (2009)
Childress, M. (2015). Life Beyond The Big Top: African American And Female Circusfolk, 1860–1920. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 15(02), 176-196. doi:10.1017/s1537781415000250
Doherty, D. (2017, July 28). Agnes Under the Big Top: Aditi Brennan Kapil's new play at Long Wharf Theatre finds that being different is something we all have in common. Retrieved from www.nhregister.com/news/article/Agnes-Under-the-Big-Top-Aditi-Brennan-Kapil-s-11573783.php
Griggs, M. (1996). Border crossings: New models of intercultural theatre. The European Legacy, 1(4), 1284-1290
Kapil, A. B. (2012, March 1). Personal Interview. Retrieved from www.arts.gov/audio/aditi-brennan-kapil
Kapil, A. B. (2012). Agnes under the big top: A tall tale. New York, . NY: Samuel French.
Kapil, A. B. (2010). Love person. New York, NY: Samuel French.
Kapil, A. B. (2014). Shiv. Chicago, IL: Dramatic Publishing.
Meerzon, I., Pewny, K., Vannieuwenhuyze, T. (2018) Introduction: Migration and Multilingualism. Modern Drama, 61(3), 257-270.
Paul, H. (2014). The myths that made America: An introduction to American studies. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Preston, R. (2011, February 22). Demystifying the immigrant experience. Retrieved from www.startribune.com/demystifying-the-immigrant-experience/116413799/
Seamon, M. (2011). Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale (review). Theatre Journal, 63(4), 640-642.
TPT Twin Cities PBS (Producer). (2011, February 24) Aditi Kapil. [Video File] www.tpt.org/mn-original/video/Aditi-Kapil-577475H-1/
Wren, C. (2013, August 22). Forum Theatre's 'Agnes Under the Big Top'. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/forum-theatres-agnes-under-the-big-top/2013/08/22/07467024-0525-11e3-bfc5-406b928603b2_story.html?utm_term=.4128e5e0c42f