An incomprehensibly vast humanitarian crisis provides both historical backdrop and urgent contemporary resonance in the brutal and compelling Trident Moon, now playing at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre.
The crisis it dramatizes is the 1947 Partition of India, when more than 15 million people were displaced, and up to 2 million died in the largest forced migration in human history. After almost 200 years of colonial rule, India’s departing British rulers drew a brand-new boundary line where none had previously existed, splitting the country into two newly independent nations — one Muslim (Pakistan) and one Hindu (India). This act – rushed, absolute and irrevocable – triggered a desperate two-directional exodus of Hindus and Muslims who found themselves on the wrong side of the line. And caught in the middle was the country’s Sikh population. The result was widespread violence, communal riots, rape and theft and mass killings, forced conversions, and one of the largest refugee crises in history. This period ripped ragged, bloody wounds in the social fabric that still inform relations between these nations and cultures.
The play, by award-winning playwright Anusree Roy, is sweeping in its historical scope — yet devastatingly personal and intimate in its execution. An unflinching look into the lives of women caught in the terror of this period, the play confines its narrative to the back of a coal truck. The truck is transporting three Hindu women dressed in pale orange, and three Muslim women dressed in pale green across Pakistan towards the newly-drawn border with India. Set designer Jawon Kang transforms the stage into the lurching transport vehicle with minimal elements: stools, a chest, and angular curtains, with the truck’s rear door looming at stage back. Audience members are where the cab of the truck would be, with its unseen male driver, who is called to, but never seen.
The characters sway as the truck moves, and sprawl when it is forced to stop at different moments. Limiting the setting to the truck’s interior ratchets up the tension and claustrophobia. Moments when the truck must stop are fraught, as the characters decide whether to allow others to enter the truck, or to protect themselves. The technical execution and Nina Lee Aquino’s tight direction create a visceral sense of danger and uncertainty.
Roy brings her characteristic intensity and directness to the script – and to her performance as Alo, one of the fleeing Hindu women. The play’s opening is tense, loud and deliberately disorienting. This truck is a microcosmic pressure cooker of religious tension, class conflict, and human desperation. And like the characters struggling with their wrenching new status quo, we fight as an audience to piece together just who they are. How are they related? Why are they behaving so cruelly? And why are they all headed for a border which brings potential safety for three, but danger and death for the other three?
Aquino draws out of the splendid cast magnificent raw performances which build to shattering emotional crescendos. To use my son’s favorite phrase when describing an intense piece of music or performance art, “this is a real banger.” In order not to spoil the viewing experience, I’ll say simply that the central conflict in the truck pits longtime family servant Alo, her sister Bani (Sehar Bhojani), and her niece Arun (Sahiba Arora) against Alo’s Muslim employers Rabia (Imali Perera) and Pari (Muhaddisah) and daughter Hera (Prerna Nehta). The source and the stakes in this struggle, we will discover, are unforgivably brutal.
But as this desperate journey progresses, we will also see other layers. The groups’ foundational differences of faith, family and class are their most obvious and unavoidable dividers, but other subterranean relationships run beneath these boundaries. Like ley lines, relationships of care and compassion reassert themselves. And new relationships — fraught and frayed, formed tentatively from shared emotions, shared stages of life, even simple desires to connect and belong — wink into visibility as the truck bounces along. Beneath the violence, the screaming and the unbearable tension, a complex web is quietly, tentatively forming that transcends familial, religious, and social boundaries.
The play’s other major characters arrive during tense, threat-filled stops. They bargain or force their way into the truck, adding danger, complexity and depth to this Gordian knot of relationships. One arrival is the very pregnant Sonali (Zorana Sadiq), a Sikh chatterbox who is on the cusp of delivering two babies and lamenting her missing husband. (She feels like a metaphor for India itself, which is violently birthing two new nations with England having fled the scene). She is idiosyncratic, pragmatic and affecting – and provides a welcome alternative perspective. The cagey, elderly Sumaiya (Afroza Banu) and her ward Munni (Michelle Mohammed) complicate further the play’s exploration of class, religion, family — and gender.
It’s no accident that Roy’s story centers these eight women of different classes, faiths and families, whose searing commonality is the lack of agency they share by virtue of being women. Each of them — as a wife, a mother, a daughter or a sister — has landed in the truck because of the actions of the men in their lives and communities. And that truck is being driven by a man across a hellscape where men are busy killing each other and raping and murdering women. So it makes sense that the play’s final character is the play’s sole male character: a predatory bandit ironically named Lovely. In the role, Mirza Sarhan channels an especially toxic brew of menace and impotence, which catalyzes the play’s wrenching climax – when these resilient women find ways to turn their lack of power and disunity into agency.
Trident Moon is important as both historical excavation and contemporary warning. The play’s special genius lies in how it makes an enormous historical tragedy deeply personal and urgent, but never loses sight of the broader implications. This production reminds us that the divisions of 1947 continue to reverberate through generations, communities and individual psyches — not to mention the entire nations of India and Pakistan. And given today’s rampant headlines about forced migration, cultural conflict and capriciously re-drawn borders, Trident Moon feels less like historical drama and more like prophecy.
This is theatre at its most vital: challenging, uncomfortable, and absolutely necessary. In its balance of claustrophobic intimacy and epic historical sweep, Trident Moon poses urgent questions about humanity’s capacity for both cruelty and connection, reminding us that the price of division is paid — and paid, and paid again — in lives and souls. And that we can overcome it only one individual at a time, and only with great courage and sacrifice.
Running at Crow’s Theatre through March 30, Trident Moon is required viewing for anyone who believes in theatre’s power to illuminate our darkest histories and most pressing contemporary challenges.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2025
