The Wanderers

By Kawa Ada

As the Soviet army invades Afghanistan, Aman and Mariam flee to Canada in hopes of putting an ocean between themselves and the daily horrors of war. A championship chess player in Kabul, Aman finds himself working in a pizzeria just to get by. Their fresh start continues to prove difficult as they navigate the trauma and displacement that follows them at every turn, and when their son Roshan is born, their curse of displacement is passed on to the next generation. The family’s only hope for a peaceful future might be Mariam’s past, as her family mythology becomes a source of power. Is her love strong enough to keep Aman and Roshan from destroying themselves or each other?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: May 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781770914247

Kawa Ada

Kawa Ada is an actor and writer. Soon after graduating from the Boston Conservatory, he was cast on Broadway in Bombay Dreams. He has since played leading roles across Canadian theatre, including at Factory, Tarragon, Belfry, Canadian Stage, and several seasons at the Shaw Festival. He won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for his debut performance at the Soulpepper Theatre Company in Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Kawa began his writing with solo shows, including The Canny Afghani, which premiered at the Boston Center for the Arts. He wrote and produced the comedy short Jihad Gigolo, which was screened at the ReelWorld Film Festival. He was born in Kabul and lives in Toronto.

Book preview

For my mother,

Razia Ada.

And my father,

Baryalai Ada.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Notes on Text and Language

Production History

Characters

EPISODE I

EPISODE II

EPISODE III

EPISODE IV

EPISODE V

Acknowledgements

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

by RIC KNOWLES

In the land that is now called Canada we are all wanderers. From the peoples Indigenous to this land who have been forced by settler invasion onto reserves or into a diasporic existence on their own traditional territories to the most recent 25,000 refugees arriving as I write from horrific conditions in Syria, this land is inhabited by migrants, voluntary or involuntary. Many who come as refugees or immigrants, such as Kawa Ada and his family, arrive by circuitous routes through dangerous and disputed territories; most attempt to lay down roots in soil that remains foreign. And many struggle with a question that is central to Kawa Ada’s remarkable play: How, for displaced peoples and families, and how, for the variously othered, is legacy established and cultural and familial continuity secured? How do children and their parents recognize one another? How do we ensure that our children are not literally, figuratively or culturally stolen from us?

The Wanderers, which I believe to be the first published Afghan Canadian play, begins in a lush park in central Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, in the mid to late 1970s (just prior to the Soviet and subsequent foreign invasion/intervention), where the play’s central character, Roshan, is, spiritually if not literally, conceived. It ends forty years later in Canada in the mining town of Sudbury, the so-called Nickel Capital of Ontario, where another miracle baby is about to be born. In between are shocking scenes in a pizza place in Toronto and a laundromat in Scarborough, along with an otherworldly father-son reunion in the same Kabul park, now a gay men’s cruising ground and a wasteland devastated by war.

Along the way we meet a precocious and desperately fragile child with a condition who sees too much; a once-champion international chess prodigy from the Afghan upper classes now fired from his job delivering pizza in Toronto; a young, gay Afghan Canadian who has inherited his mother’s special powers as a descendant of the Sun God, Mithra; an Iranian Canadian Daddy Joe whose wife has just left him and a feisty, sexy, working-class white woman from northern Ontario. We meet Wanderers and scorpions.

The Wanderers is a play of epic proportions and extraordinary breadth and depth written by a playwright with remarkable intelligence and a global sensibility. Much of this sensibility derives from an understanding of Afghan history, and of global societies grappling with the ravages of modernity and the imperatives of globalization. As Aman says presciently in the play,

Afghan—look at Afghanistan—we tried to become too much, too modern—we thinking we are like the next Turkey—but we are pushed back, always, huh? First, from British—you know they invade three times? And three times we beat them! They do not think—no one thinks—Afghan is that strong, but they learn, everyone learn. This is very embarrassing for, ehh—what is name . . . Churchill! The British give up, no? And one day, the Russians will too. But someone else, they will come, they will take they spot. And . . . but this is the repeated history of histories—you understand what I’m saying: Afghanistan is a pawn.

Among those who will come are, of course, the Americans (Oh God, the Americans!), supported by Canada. And three of the play’s five episodes take place in Canada (the play only seems episodic early on, until the audience begins to follow the clues), where other sorts of complication and confusion occur. As Aman also says, Iranian Christian? Iranian. Christian. This is Canada! and after all, the Wanderers, by definition, wander globally even as the play speaks to the struggle for continuities among specific dismembered diasporic and mixed families and communities. Careful, as two of the play’s threatened characters variously say. You hurt me and it ripples through our line.

Kawa Ada is a young playwright with what his play would call special powers. He brings together in one work a uniquely Afghan Canadian perspective on such imperative topics for our time as sex and sexuality, cultural and generational difference, immigration, disability, class, gender and age. And he does so with a finely tuned ear for the rhythms of character and scene construction, and a fluency with voice and dialogue that cuts like a knife across different linguistic expressions of class, race, place and culture. His ear for dialogue and voice is a gift to actors and a window for audiences into the souls of the characters and the social systems that shape and constrain them. I look forward with pleasure and anticipation to what I hope will be a large body of work from a major new voice on the Canadian stage.

NOTES ON TEXT AND LANGUAGE

There are certain devices in the text I would like to explain. But, as with all signposts laid out for the reader and/or practitioner, they are indicators of my intention and need not be entirely prescriptive.

Beats, Lapses, and Pauses

Something should always be happening during beats, lapses, and pauses. These silences are not a chance to drop the energy or tension:

A beat is as long as an inhale of breath, indicating a change of thought or direction. Beats are usually not shared, but confined to the person who spoke just prior to the beat.

A lapse is the length of two beats. It is shared by characters.

A pause is as long as necessary. It is shared by characters.

Ellipses, Dashes, and Slashes

Whether on its own, within a chunk of dialogue or at the end of a line, ellipses ( . . . ) can be many things here. Usually, it is a trailing off, a searching for a thought, or an unspoken implication of a word or thought that is supposedly understood by the other character. They should be played out and not interrupted.

A dash ( — ) within a character’s line usually means the next phrase is either parenthetical, a self-interruption, or an intensification of a thought. Dashes at the end of a character’s speech are interruptions by the next character.

Forward slashes ( / ) are used