Synopsis

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.

Educational Purposes

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."

Discussion Questions

1. For what purposes does Kapil use the subtitle, "a tall tale"? How are these tales in the story juxtaposed with the concept of "The American Dream"?
2. Would you consider this play to be a celebration or a criticism of the immigration experience?
3. Kapil references the influence of her Indian heritage and its employment of magical realism in storytelling. Where is this evident in the play and how does it impact the story?
4. What do the flashbacks reveal about each immigrant character (The Busker, Agnes, Shipkov, Roza, and Happy)?
5. Kapil uses a great amount of metaphor in this play, including the symbolism of birds, the subway, and the circus (The Big Top). What do each of these symbols represent and how do they problematize and/or move the story forward?

Supplemental Activity

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:

1. Teacher will invite an outsider of the class who is an immigrant and primary language is not English to come and read a poem or story in their native language (one of their own making or of something that they personally identify with).
2. Visitor will introduce themselves and read their work in their native language as if the class completely understands.
3. Following the reading, visitor will then instruct students in their native language to journal for 5 minutes about their experience hearing the poem. Assuming that there will be confusion, the visitor will then repeat in English indicating that they are repeating for those who are non-native speakers (of the visitor's primary language.)
4. Visitor's questions may include :
   • How did you feel when you did not understand the language?
   • What did you want to do when the reader begin to recite in a language with which you were unfamiliar?
   • Were you able to pick up on any aspect of the poem—cadence, emotion—despite not knowing the language?
   • For those who might have understood the language, how did the poem make you feel?
   • What was your thought about classmates who could not understand the poem? How might you have helped them?
   • How might the teacher and the reader have helped you to understand the poem?
5. Find students who are willing to share their responses to the class and read them out loud.
6. Ask students how might their experience be similar to the immigrant experience.
7. Open the floor to questions to the visitor from class. What might they want to know more about?

Modifications:

1. This activity requires deep understanding of class dynamics and must recognize the sensitivity of this subject matter, especially if their are immigrant students in the classroom. Speak with immigrant students in the classroom prior to activity to confirm that they would be comfortable with this exercise.
2. Utilize immigrant students who may be interested in assisting in the activity. If there is a student that you think could succeed as the facilitator by all means give them the opportunity!!
3. If there is a lot of diversity in the classroom you can find ways for this to become a writing exercise for the students as well. Have students make their own work in their preferred language and then have those non-English speakers share their work.

Synopsis

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.

Educational Purposes

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.

Synopsis

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.

Educational Purposes

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.

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