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Majumdar dons whiteface in TNW double-feature

The loops of symbolism spin like a DNA strand, colours spiraling like listless flags of nations. In the double feature on now at Theatre Northwest, the audience is introduced to a character name Candice.
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Anita Majumdar dons whiteface for the role of Candice in double feature, Fish Eyes and Let Me Borrow That Top, running at Theatre Northwest until Oct. 7.

The loops of symbolism spin like a DNA strand, colours spiraling like listless flags of nations.

In the double feature on now at Theatre Northwest, the audience is introduced to a character name Candice. She is a prototypical suburban blonde "girl next door" portrayed by Anita Majumdar.

Were Majumdar playing the part of Shakespear'es Ophelia or the title character in Jack Grinhaus's Hedda Noir we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Were Candice being played by Saoirse Ronan or Sarah Gadon, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

But Majumdar wrote the script for Candice, deliberately cast herself, and proceeded to paint on a layer of makeup as part of Candice's first on-stage action. Majumdar's visibly brown skin was now white, as was Candice's ethnicity.

Majumdar was knowingly engaged in an act of whiteface, the flipping of the script in response to the now reviled practice of Caucasian actors doing blackface.

Twisting this incident even more tightly was how the character of Candice was fully engaged in chasing her dream of being a Bollywood dancer, enjoyed painting her hands with henna art, and was blissfully thoughtless in her full embrace of appropriating the culture of India for herself.

It was a brown actor playing a white character aping a foreign culture. It's dizzying.

"We do like to stir the pot, yes," said Grinhaus, who brought Majumdar to Prince George to perform the one-two punch of Fish Eyes and Let Me Borrow That Top, a pair of interconnected stories about growing up on opposite sides of the all-too-real ethnic divide inside suburban Canadian high school.

"She does whiteface and she knows that will bring up the response of 'why is it OK for you to do whiteface but it's not OK for a white actor to do blackface?' That's a valid question. And there is a valid answer. And it has everything to do with who is in a position of cultural power when this is done."

"My experience growing up in Port Moody as a young person in high school, I felt very disempowered," Majumdar told The Citizen. "I felt either it (incidents of prejudice) was happening to me, or it was happening to friends, or people I didn't know at all. I felt like I couldn't do anything about it. I didn't have the language, I didn't have the expression to understand how to combat this. How do I stand up to these people, whom I'm afraid of? If I intervene for my friend or stand up for myself, that could cause more problems for me. Tack onto that not only am I a person of colour, I'm also a woman of colour."

Majumdar said the hammers of prejudice and blatant ethnic bias continued to strike her throughout university, throughout additional theatre schooling, and still to this day in commonplace adult life.

It was not a coincidence that she channeled her anger into her art. Majumdar is famous, now, from coast to coast for playing high profile roles on stage and screen, almost all of them of Indian descent.

For example, in the CBC TV movie Murder Unveiled she played an Indo-Canadian bride murdered after she wed a lower-caste man against her family's wishes. She won the Best Female Performance award at the Asian Festival of First Films in Singapore then turned the same role into a play called The Misfit which won it's own Dora Mavor Moore Award.

She was featured in the acclaimed film Midnight's Children, starred at The Stratford Festival in the 2011 production of Rice Boy, and co-starred with Leon Aureus in the play Aisha n' Ben which again she wrote and included in her character's storyline an Indian woman's obsession with skin lightening.

Pushing her ethnicity into the bright white spotlight is about winning back lost ground, she said, and underlining the purported values of Canada that all walks of life are welcome to do all things on an equal basis. She learned expressionism skills via theatre training, and she's using them to depict a more accurate picture of Canadian culture by taking a noticeable place within the images emanating from TV, film and live drama.

Since prejudice is so prevalent in the lives of those apparently different, backhanding the blackface theatre tradition is one way of getting the attention of the blissfully, ignorantly privileged.

"Blackface comes from a long-standing, horrible tradition of a class of people who were white, and they stood in a position of power and entitlement, who made fun of their slaves - people they brought over on boats (through means of violent kidnapping) and made work for them, with no rights, weren't even considered human," said Majumdar who, in addition to being a writer and actor, has a B.A. in English, Theatre, and South Asian Languages from the University of British Columbia, and is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada.

"They would create these stage shows, and put themselves in blackface, and pretend to be black slaves, mimicking lazy behaviour, mimicking how stupid they were. The blackface model as a theatrical device was meant to make fun of. And we still see people doing it. There are still theatrical forms that use that device and think it's ok.

"Within our context, the whiteface in our show is a kind of reclamation. Having to listen to people do Indian accents at me, inaccurately, takes on that mimicry of making fun of someone stupid.

In our show, I don't think Candice is stupid. I think she's quite the opposite.

"The device of whiteface is a callout to that racist tradition. It is also a part of the model of the show, that being Candice doing a makeup tutorial for YouTube. She's putting on her foundation. That's how the character looks when she puts on her palest of pale foundation.

"What I think our version of blackface is, in the form of whiteface, is that we are in fact extremely charitable to Candice. We show both sides. I'm extremely unapologetic as I play her. She is who she is. You don't want to be her friend, but there is something charismatic about her. She's a leader, she knows what she wants, she's a teenaged girl who plans her own grad and decides she wants to be the greatest Indian dancer in the world, and pursues that goal even though it's appropriative.

"She's a complicated person, which is the opposite of what blackface does. Blackface supposes a person to be a flat image, they are stupid and they are lazy because of their race. Our play does the exact opposite while borrowing a form that is extremely offensive and hurtful."

What's especially remarkable, within the framing of Fish Eyes and Let Me Borrow That Top is the laughter these plays elicit. They are, despite the heavy load of the subject matter, comedies. Powerful social commentary can be funny.

"Hahaha. Who knew?" said Majumdar, enjoying the paradox. "But it doesn't feel funny when it's happening, that's for sure."

Majumdar is on stage at Theatre Northwest until Oct. 7.