Boys With Cars announces itself with the thrum of Bollywood bangers and hip‑hop under creator Anita Majumdar’s breathless command, then tightens its focus to a nested set of questions facing the teenage inhabitants of the small town of Port Moody, B.C.. Who gets to move freely through the high school hallway? Who must dance for permission to do so? And who is allowed to give or revoke that permission, and with what consequences?
This one‑woman theatre‑dance hybrid follows Naz, a South Asian‑Canadian teen whose gift for Kathak dance becomes both a passport and a source of peril. Majumdar writes, choreographs, and performs every role—the brutally candid Naz, her swaggering boyfriend Lucky Punjabi, her no‑nonsense guardian Gustakhi, mean white girl queen‑bee Candace, and more—with surgical precision and fearless mimicry. The story spools forward and back, reframing moments to show how power, privilege, and consent are negotiated, withdrawn or trampled on in this mainly white, small‑town ecosystem, which is ruled by the male gaze and the “boys with cars” who wield it.
That’s the big idea, and in service of it, Majumdar and director‑dramaturg Brian Quirt ensure that the show lands its quick-cut time shifts, and that her Khatak dance is the work’s thematic and visual centre, not simply an adornment. When we first meet Naz, she is reluctantly preparing to dance as the paid entertainment at the wedding of a couple of her former classmates. We then retrace the events of the last several months that brought her here.
Majumdar’s Naz is an exquisite Kathak dancer, but she never dances for herself. Instead, her dance is celebrated and consumed, and imitated and appropriated by those around her. This happens first when she dances at a local festival called Golden Spikefest. She recounts how “the Cools” “press their eyes into me while licking ice cream cones.” Through this creepy blend of voyeurism and judgment, she is elevated into their circle. But as one of the few Indians in Port Moody, she ultimately pays a heavy price: sexual assault, followed by slut-shaming, self- condemnation, and expulsion from high school society. And heartbreakingly, Naz’s dance movements—her form of self-expression—get irretrievably tangled up in her replays of the assault.
Nightswimming’s production at YPT’s Ada Slaight Stage is slick and tight. Jackie Chau’s set and costumes give Majumdar a clean, transformable playground backed by an overlarge boombox for Naz’s story, and then a second different, yet similarly functional, playground for the work’s second part. Rebecca Picherack’s lighting carves perspective and time; while Christopher Stanton’s sound and projections stitch hip‑hop, Bollywood and school‑hall ambience into a single fabric. The design team collectively serves the story’s densest turns with both restraint and bite—especially the surprising mid‑show trapdoor which opens beneath Naz’s story … and drops us back in time into Candace’s world.
This section is a provocation that deepens everything. In a brazenly meta act of reverse cultural appropriation, Majumdar first becomes Naz’s nemesis Candace. Then Candace delivers a selfie‑styled tutorial that slides into a breathlessly unself-conscious masterclass in entitlement, cultural appropriation and outright racism. And yet… Candace does not exist in a vacuum. She, too, has had a difficult upbringing. She, too, has ambitions and a desire for agency. And though Candace lives higher on the social ladder than Naz, she, too, is hemmed in by those boys with cars who are always circling, and are the only ones able to go where they want, when they want.
Two stories: one system. Embodied in a single powerful performance.
When Majumdar first performed this show at YPT back in 2017, deservedly winning two Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Performance, my then-high school-age son saw the show with us, and we discussed it at length afterwards. He still remembers the show for Majumdar’s multi-layered performance, the urgency of the subject matter—and for the textured pop cultural background, which made it feel like it had sprung, full-blown, from the spirit of the time. This leads me to my one reservation about the 2026 show. A number of the original show’s touchstones—the Chris Brown/Rihanna assault, Slumdog Millionaires and the song Jai Ho, the Twilight films, and CW‑era TV—now show their age. At the same time, Punjabi music has since moved into the global mainstream (think of how festival stages, streaming charts and even the Juno Awards, which have amplified Indian music in recent years). Without updates, these specific references, which were a strength of the original show, risk confusing today’s teens.
That said, this show moves, and its core and its star unquestionably compel. In the show, Naz insists that her own situation parallels that of Rihanna and Chris Brown: “Looking from the outside, you don’t know anything.” Boys With Cars remains a bracing and necessary reminder of this truth. Funny, profane and devastating, it asks for—no, it demands — that we exercise curiosity, not judgment, when it comes to matters of consent, culture, and criticism. In the process, it is still certain to spark well-deserved introspection and conversation among young people and their parents and teachers.
Boys with Cars runs at Young People’s Theatre through April 24, 2026. Tickets are available at www.youngpeoplestheatre.org.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
