There is a disarmingly poignant aura hovering over Nawaaz Makhani’s bol, brown boy, bol. Part of it comes from the script, an autobiographical journey through the performer’s uneasy negotiation of Indian and Canadian identity. Then there is the millennial nostalgia, carried by the cluster of 1990s debris that director Tiffany Wu arranges on a platform at stage left: a campy blanket themed around Disney’s Aladdin, Superman posters, Spider-Man toys, fragments of a bedroom wall – the visual archaeology of a long-gone boyhood. But what lowers the audience’s defences most is Makhani’s own tenderness. As he tells the story, he is glassy-eyed, occasionally blushing, never quite concealing the uneasiness that comes with exposing such intimate material.
The play follows the actor’s life from childhood to adulthood, tracing how the pressure to belong gradually becomes a habit of self-erasure. Growing up in the largely white neighbourhood of Richmond Hill, other children mock him for a presumed smell of curry and call him “Paki,” a slur that collapses Pakistan and India into the same racist imaginary. With adolescence, he learns to disown the parts of himself that make him feel different. He tries to blend in through rap, gold chains and borrowed swagger, chasing a ready-made script for masculinity and confidence. Later, as a university-aged version of himself, he pulls bratty faces while locked in the bathroom with wax strips, reluctantly listening to family voicemails as he tries to remove his body hair. The scene is funny, but the joke catches in the throat when he actually tears hair from his own body, making the audience gasp.
Makhani embodies these memories in a playful, deliberately goofy register. Wearing an oversized backpack with his elbows tucked tightly into the straps, he performs the awkwardness of a boy trying not to take up space. The gap between the grown actor and the child he is portraying becomes one of the show’s sharpest theatrical tools. We do not see a realistic teenager; we see the memory of one, filtered through a man who has endured that embarrassment in his own body. His vulnerability quietly changes the room, making the audience more tender, more willing to sit with discomfort.
Wu and Makhani structure this search for selfhood around a series of figures the protagonist clings to at different stages of his life. At eight, he looks to Bollywood star Salman Khan, whose poster hangs in his bedroom. As a teenager, he turns to Jay-Z, finding in him a borrowed model of confident, cool masculinity. Christine Wu’s sound design deepens this cultural layering. Moving between Indian classical music, 1990s Bollywood nostalgia, grunge, rap and hip hop, music becomes a language for self-recognition.
That acoustic world eventually gathers around the tabla, a traditional Indian instrument consisting of a pair of tuned hand drums. Makhani first encounters it as a child, enchanted by its sound during a concert and eager to begin lessons. By adolescence, embarrassment and rage have pushed him away from anything that might mark him as South Asian, including the practice itself. Around 30, in a period of bewilderment and self-doubt, he returns to the tabla through long-distance lessons conducted over Skype with a guru based in India. The instrument becomes a meditative practice, a source of calm amid the self-fracture.
Near the end, an extended musical sequence tests Makhani’s stamina. For roughly ten minutes, he drills himself with relentless precision against the pulse of a metronome, alternating between playing the tabla and reciting its rhythmic syllables, known as bols – the spoken patterns that give the play its title. The scene is beautifully shaped: Christine Wu’s sound design layers voice memos into the practice, while Lindsay Murray’s lighting fades in and out with a pulse of its own, creating an atmosphere that seems to breathe with the musical performance.
After a lifetime spent trying to resolve fragmentation by cutting parts of himself away, Makhani learns to inhabit identity as something irreducible. The show has not solved his divided sense of self. It has given him a practice: sit down, keep time, speak the bols, begin again. And we are invited to listen.
bol, brown boy, bol, presented by CQC Arts in association with Blemme Fatale Productions, continues at Native Earth Performing Arts’ Aki Studio until MAy 24, 2026. Tickets are available at nativeearth.ca.
© Alessandro Straccuzzi, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
