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Review: Elyria Journeys Across Continents in a Tale of Friendship and Betrayal

Deepa Purohit’s play is making its world premiere at Atlantic Theater Company.

Nilanjana Bose play Vasanta, and Gulshan Mia plays Dhatta in Deepa Purohit's Elyria, directed by Awoye Timpo, at Atlantic Theater Company.
Nilanjana Bose play Vasanta, and Gulshan Mia plays Dhatta in Deepa Purohit's Elyria, directed by Awoye Timpo, at Atlantic Theater Company.
(© Ahron R. Foster)

Elyria tells the kind of story that we see too infrequently on New York stages. We are accustomed to plays dealing with the immigrant experience in America, but rarely do we hear the experiences of those who come from Southeast Asian countries, much less of those who have arrived in the United States from India via Africa. In that sense Deepa Purohit's play, now debuting off-Broadway, provides us with the sort of story that is often overlooked.

It's too bad that what could have been a deep dive into the culture of its characters proves to be more head-scratching than edifying. Directed by Awoye Timpo, Elyria, named for the Ohio city in which the play takes place, revolves around two Indian women, Vasanta (Nilanjana Bose) and Dhatta (Gulshan Mia), both of whom grow up in Africa (Kenya and Tanzania), meet at college in Baroda, India, sever their friendship for some reason (we find out why later), move to Nairobi and London with their respective husbands, and then by chance meet again in Elyria in 1982.

Vasanta's husband, Shiv (Sanjit De Silva), is struggling to make his mark and sees New Jersey as the place where that will happen. Dhatta and her husband, Charu (Bhavesh Patel), a successful doctor, live a comfortable life with their son, Rohan (Mohit Gautam), who is getting ready to follow in his father's professional footsteps by attending medical school. But Dhatta has been keeping a secret about their son from Charu, and now that Vasanta has moved into town, that secret threatens to come out into the open and shatter the life that they've built for themselves.

As potentially engaging as the story is, Purohit and Timpo make the audience work a bit too hard just to understand what is going on, especially in Act 1. (At intermission I overheard two audience members trying to figure out the characters' relationships with one another.) The first act impressionistically blends scenes together and occasionally incorporates dance (choreography by Parijat Desai and beautiful costumes by Sarita Fellows) to tell the story, but the overall effect leaves us feeling unprepared for Act 2.

Omar Shafiuzzaman plays Hassanali, and Mohit Gautam plays Rohan in Elyria at Atlantic Stage.
Omar Shafiuzzaman plays Hassanali, and Mohit Gautam plays Rohan in Elyria at Atlantic Stage.
(© Ahron R. Foster)

Part of this may be intentional. Jason Ardizzone-West's sparse set gets rid of the Atlantic Theater's proscenium in favor of a stage in the round. The openness of the space, along with broad swaths of light created by designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew and '80s pop tunes piped in by sound designer Amatus Karim-Ali, invites the audience to feel a part of the proceedings. What we will see is meant to be a community performance, rather than a typical play, so perhaps traditional storytelling was not necessarily the goal here.

Be that as it may, things don't start to come into focus until the second act, during which Purohit starts to piece the story together for us in a series of boxy scenes stacked precariously one on top of another. Here it becomes clearer that the two dancers we've seen since the beginning (Mahima Saigal and Avanthika Srinivasan) are girlhood versions of Vasanta and Dhatta, that the man (Sanskar Agarwal) who's been wandering around with a book of poems throughout the show is a young Charu, and that Rohan's London-bred college buddy Hassanali (Omar Shafiuzzaman) is, as we've suspected all along, his budding romantic interest. The fact that this last revelation occurs so ridiculously late in Act 2 and can receive no further examination (what are the cultural implications of these two young men falling in love?) makes it feel like a tacked-on subplot that could easily have been cut, shortening the two-hour, 30-minute run time.

Shagginess and confusion aside, the production boasts a few fine performances. Patel steals his scenes as Rohan's dad, hilariously urging his son to make him proud at college and get a nice girlfriend. Bose moves us with her anguish over the love that she lost and found and lost again. And Shafiuzzaman gives a great turn as a swaggering young man who hides a lot under a confident façade. But that's not enough to recommend Elyria, which struggles to find a cohesive plot to put flesh on the bones. It is an ambitious attempt, but ultimately experimental theatrics get in the way of a potentially good story.

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Elyria

Closed: March 19, 2023