I should begin with a caveat, as I occasionally must. I am going to write about a play, “Agnes Under the Big Top,” by Aditi Brennan Kapil, currently playing at Mixed Blood. Firstly, I should state that I know Kapil, and have for many years — we went through an educational program in improv comedy all the way back in 2000, and have remained friendly since. Secondly, I once submitted a script of my own to Mixed Blood, which was rejected, although it was a nice enough rejection, as these things go. Kapil wrote the email, and explained that Mixed Blood doesn’t typically do period pieces. My play was a period piece. I didn’t mind it, but it seems a good idea to get these facts out of the way at the start.
I never submitted scripts to local theaters back when I was with City Pages, because it seemed to me it would be awfully hard to be both a playwright and a critic in the same town. Back then it really wasn’t done. There were a few people — Michael Feingold of the Village Voice for one, and I used to hear occasional dismissals when he didn’t like a play. “Oh,” somebody would say, “he submitted a script there and was rejected.” What an awful thing to have said about you, and what an easy way to ignore what you have to say! I never wanted that.
But I have grown less worried. After all, Oscar Wilde was a theater critic. So was George Bernard Shaw. They managed it. And if people want to dismiss my comments, they can pick any number of reasons to do so besides the fact that I am a playwright. My fashion sense, for one. So what if I submitted a script? That particular play has already had 11 productions, including two in New York. It’s not suffering for the fact that Mixed Blood wasn’t the best match for it.
But this means that I must occasionally write these little essays of full disclosure. And so, having done so, let’s move on.
This is the first script I have seen by Kapil, although I have seen quite a bit of her work as an actress. From what other critics say, “Agnes Under the Big Top” is not her strongest effort, and I am going to agree with some of what they have grumbled about. The play tells of a group of recent immigrants in New York and their intersecting lives, and centers around a bedroom and a subway train, both built at opposite ends of a long, narrow stage flanked on both sides by the audience.
I feel, as others did, that the script is crowded and disjointed, in that Kapil is telling five stories, and each could be its own play. As a result, some of the stories seem choppy or incompletely motivated, some feel abandoned, and sometimes it feels as though themes from one story have been transplanted to another, where they are ill-fitting, for the sake of making the play a cohesive whole. There is, for example, the story of Happy, a native of India who moved to the United States convinced of his own destiny of greatness, but whose unfailing optimism goes ahead and fails anyway, leading him to consider a criminal act he finds repugnant.
This is a terrific story, in and of itself, and, as with the rest of the play, Kapil (who directed) has located a marvelous actor to play the role: Ankit Dogra. He makes his optimism physical, sometimes shimmying during his dialogue like an actor in a Bollywood movie, and he has a marvelous way of responding when challenged: His mouth becomes tight, and then, after a moment’s consideration, returns to a beaming smile, as though optimism were an act of will. But when he starts moving toward misbehavior, it’s not clear what motivated it — something about a vague “investment opportunity,” which one gets the sense is bluster. But he finds criminality so anathematic — he’s genuinely concerned about his karmic balance — that this plot turn feels lacking. And then, at the end of the play, he just disappears, his storyline abandoned.
This play has been workshopped extensively, and, had I been part of the workshop, I might have suggested that Kapil make this five plays, instead of one, to give each story the time it deserves. But there is a risk in that sort of suggestion. There is a theme that links every single one of these stories, and it’s unforced, and it’s a good one that Kapil tells well. The play proposes that who we are is at least as much a product of our environment as it is of our will — a fact that jibes with my experiences as someone who has moved around a lot, including having spent time abroad. None of the characters turned out to be who they expected to be when they immigrated to the United States, most poignantly expressed by a Bulgarian character who had been a circus star in her home country. She feels so alien and unimportant in this new country that it has rendered her mute — a role played with quick, suspicious mannerisms and a haunted visage by Virginia Burke.
Her story is shared by the others: her husband, a former ringmaster whose ambitions have dwindled and now drives a subway car (Nathaniel Fuller), and a Liberian woman. This is the titular Agnes (Shá Cage), who has inherited her grandmother’s love of tall tales, but, facing a terminal diagnosis of cancer, finds that impulse toward exaggeration turning to lies she tells her son. These are all lovely stories, and the thematic thread that connects them is significant. I wouldn’t know what to tell Kapil to do to make sure each story gets its due, except perhaps to not be afraid to write a very long play. Each character deserves to have his or her story told in full.
Coincidentally, the immigrant experience is also represented by a small show and a much larger online project by the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library and the The Immigration History Research Center. The latter has an extraordinary collection of letters written to and by immigrants to America, which have mostly been stashed away. In the past year, the center began an extraordinary program to translate and digitize these letters and put them online. Further, they have looked to match these letters to companions in similar archives around the world. The first group of these letters can be found online.
As a companion to this project, the Anderson library has put on display a small selection of the letters, called “A Heart Connects Us: The Experience of Migration and the ‘Minnesota School’ of Immigration History,” and it is quite arresting. Many of the letters are quite old, and while sometimes these sorts of letters can get caught up in mundane details of bank transactions or legal issues, they frequently contain expressions of longing and anguish for family left behind. Our world has contracted in ways that are invisible to us, but it’s not uncommon to have daily communications with friends and family in other states and even elsewhere in the world, at almost no cost. But go back 100 years ago and all you have are scraps of paper, bundled into burlap sacks and transported thousands of miles by train, boat and horse. A letter might take months to arrive, and might get lost altogether. And to travel that distance, and to visit the family you left behind? The cost could be enormous, the voyage would take weeks or months, and there was a real chance you might die on it. These letters capture the enormity of that distance, which sometimes feels as monumental as a seance in which the living try to stretch their hand out into the world of the dead and find some evidence of a lost loved one.
In one case, it very literally feels like that. The exhibit has a letter by Diego Delfino, a Neopolitan physician who immigrated in the early part of the 20th century. On Oct. 6 of 1926, he wrote these words to his daughter in Reggio Calabria, Italy:
“Your letter, the only far-away message from across the seas, my dear daughter, fills my heart with satisfaction, thinking that no other relative is thinking of me anymore. Concerning your nightmare, in which two killers wanted to stab me to death, and you protected me by plunging in front of me, therefore saving my life and sacrificing yours, well, there is nothing to be surprised about. I’m expecting a new attempt on my life, cowardly premeditated, by the hoodlums, but so far no one is coming. God is with me. He will defend me from these attempts, from my enemies. He will give me the opportunity to exact my revenge, when the time comes.” (This letter can be seen online.)
On Nov. 17, a little more than a month later, he was brutally murdered. This was the last letter he ever wrote to his daughter. And there it sits, at the Andersen library, a voice from the world of the dead, telling us sad tales of immigration long ago, and they also deserve to be told in full.
