“While walking along the road, who knows where and when a touch of grace might arrive?”
That question, carried in one of the Rabindra sangeet selections playing before the house lights dim, provides a haunting undertone in Pamela Mala Sinha’s New, now on stage at the Alumnae Theatre. Translated from the Bengali “Pothe Chole Jete Jete,” sung by the renowned Debabrata Biswas, the query and the larger song are rooted in Rabindranath Tagore’s recurring use of the pathik, or wandering seeker whose life journey is shaped by longing, pain, faith, and endurance. It becomes an understated but apt thematic subtext for a play about immigration which is less concerned with arrival than with the uncertain act of becoming. And critically, this preshow music situates us in a specifically Bengali cultural register — not a sweeping “South Asian” blur — before the play opens.
Set in 1970 Winnipeg, New centres on a group of interconnected Bengali immigrants whose lives intersect inside a shared apartment building. At the centre is Nuzha (Stephanie Bisram), a young Bengali Muslim woman who arrives in Canada after a long-distance marriage arranged over the phone. Her husband Qasim (Raj Beteille) is leading a double life with a Canadian girlfriend Abby (JeN Hashimoto), and is unprepared for the realities of a marriage he feels coerced into. Around them orbit two other couples: Sita (Zahshanné Malik), who has given up a promising dancing career to move to Canada with her professor husband, Sachin (Noor Alimran); and Master’s student and outspoken feminist Aisha (Nikki Barran) and her longtime friend-turned-husband Ash (Gurmeet Bajwa). As the play unfolds, each couple – and each member of each couple – will negotiate marriage, desire, compromise and freedom under the compounded pressures of migration, gendered expectation, and racialization.
Sinha’s writing resists shorthand and stereotype, allowing her characters to be contradictory, sometimes frustrating, often generous. Themes of love and sacrifice, sexual autonomy, racism, and cultural inheritance emerge through the characters’ social and domestic interactions. The newly arrived Nuzha’s arc is especially compelling: her growing independence unfolds through small, cumulative acts, like learning bus routes, forming friendships, and discovering pleasure and agency beyond the role she has been assigned. For her, freedom and autonomy are incremental and hard-won.
The measured and empathetic approach to the characters is a function of the playwright’s journey. As Sinha describes in an interview with Sesaya Arts, she began writing New out of rage at the absence of such stories from Canadian stages, but that urgency and edge were honed — and ultimately softened — through interviews with her parents’ friends. As members of a 1970s era Bengali immigrant community, their generosity and candour deeply informed the play. Sinha’s ability to listen and witness is palpable in New’s emotional and cultural texture, and its appropriate blending of pathos and humour. (Read the full interview with Sinha on sesayarts.com.)
Director Summer Mahmud brings clarity and emotional intelligence to this script, which spans multiple relationships and moments in time. Rather than dividing the stage into discrete locations, the production embraces a single shared playing space: one apartment, rendered without walls and anchored by a single doorway at back and a doorway representation at front, which represents the threshold to the outdoors. This choice proves both practical and expressive. With the absence of walls allows the characters’ lives seem to bleed into one another, reinforcing the sense that privacy is provisional and that community — whether welcome or intrusive — is always close.
Lighting design by Tushar Tukaram Dalvi performs essential narrative work, using subtle shifts in colour and intensity to signal whose apartment we are in, and whose emotional world we are inhabiting. Warm washes, cooler hues, and shadowed edges allow the same physical space to belong to the different couples. Outdoor scenes, including those at the airport and the river, are suggested through lighting, sound, and actor movement – trusting the audience to complete the image.
Designed by Asefeh Katoozian, the set rewards close attention without overstatement. The single apartment functions as a shared domestic container, rather than a literal floor plan, allowing emotional proximity to do the storytelling work. Within this pared-back environment, small material details — such as a kantha (a thin embroidered quilt from saris) draped over the back of the sofa — implicitly root the space in Bengali domestic life.
The script carries this cultural specificity even more decisively. Early in the play, Qasim recites a quotation by Rabindranath Tagore, a towering Bengali cultural touchstone whom Sinha has spoken about as formative, which establishes lineage and inheritance as lived and spoken ideas, rather than mere decorative markers. Later, the observance of Bhai Phota (“Brothers’ Day”) unfolds as an enacted ritual, allowing tradition to register through action and relationship, rather than symbolism. Together, these moments reinforce the play’s commitment to specificity as embodied practice and not mere aesthetic flavour.
Music further sharpens the production’s historical and emotional contours. Alongside Rabindrasangeet, selections such as The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” and Asha Bhosle’s era-defining “Dum Maro Dum” situate the play firmly in the early 1970s — a moment when political awakening, counterculture, and sexual liberation collided, often uneasily, with inherited expectations around marriage and duty. These musical choices underscore the characters’ exposure to multiple cultural currents — none of which offers an easy map forward.
The ensemble delivers consistently strong performances across the board. Bisram brings quiet restraint and attentiveness to new bride Nuzha, allowing vulnerability and resolve to coexist without sentimentality. Beteille captures husband Qasim’s evasiveness, without softening its consequences. Alimran and Malik convey the layered tensions of a marriage shaped by affection and competing visions of freedom, while Barran, Bajwa, and Hashimoto bring emotional complexity to roles that might otherwise recede in a crowded narrative. As embodied by the actors, the play’s many group scenes — dinners, gatherings, moments of dance and shared music — feel genuinely and nostalgically communal.
If New occasionally strains under the weight of its many storylines, its expansiveness feels integral to its vision. The play is less interested in neat resolution than in accumulation — of moments, pressures, compromises … and quiet awakenings and sometimes surprising new paths. Immigration here is not a single event: it’s an ongoing process of negotiation: with the self, with others, and with the twin powers of aspiration and reality.
And by placing the audience in a sonic world of Rabindra sangeet at the start and again during intermission, this Alumnae Theatre production (the company’s first South Asian–led one) invites a way of attending that extends beyond the play itself. If “Pothe Chole Jete Jete” lingers in the mind, it is less because the production insists, than because New so carefully maps emotional terrain that manifests the song’s imagery of the seeker. Meaning, like belonging, is not a promised inevitability of arrival at a physical destination: instead, it emerges — often unexpectedly — in the act of walking forward. Sinha’s play offers a multilayered and emotionally grounded portrait of the sometimes divergent, sometimes circuitous, sometimes potholed road that newcomers walk toward what is possible.
New is on stage at the Alumnae Theatre until February 8, 2026. Tickets are available at alumnaetheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
