“A Fine Balance” and “Being Heumann” Put People Inside History – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Frontmezzjunkies Theatre and Film Review: From a cramped Bombay apartment to a 1977 disability rights occupation in San Francisco, two stories make history feel remarkably close.

By Ross

How did I not know this? That question has been following me around this week, especially after seeing Crow’s Theatre’s world-premiere stage adaptation of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. It is the question I cannot shake. We know that history is filled with political upheaval, authoritarian governments, poverty, discrimination, and people fighting simply to survive, but the human stories buried inside those enormous events can still somehow remain just out of our reach. Anosh Irani’s adaptation of Mistry’s celebrated novel puts four such lives directly in front of us, and over the course of three hours, those lives become impossible to dismiss, forget, or keep at arm’s length.

Set during India’s 1975 Emergency, when democratic freedoms were suspended and the machinery of the state reached deeply into everyday life, A Fine Balance brings together four strangers whose circumstances could hardly seem further apart. Dina is a grieving widow trying to maintain her independence and keep her small business alive. Ishvar and Omprakash are lower-caste tailors looking for work and dignity in a system that has repeatedly denied them both. Maneck is a student whose education has opened his mind to possibilities beyond the confines of class and separatism, even as the realities surrounding him begin closing in. They find themselves coming together, then living together in Dina’s cramped Bombay apartment, where a room meant to provide income becomes a place where friendship, humour, trauma, frustration, and hope are sewn together in tight, messy stitches.

Irani’s adaptation has an enormous task in front of it, taking a 700-page novel and finding a theatrical language that can hold its breadth without losing the intimacy of its characters. He succeeds by keeping the storytelling deeply engaged with the people at its centre. The script is intricate, engrossing, and epic in scope, yet it never feels as though the audience is being dragged through a history lesson. We are given enough of the political world to understand the forces pressing down on these characters through sound waves, background static, and the constant presence of events beyond Dina’s apartment, while the storytelling keeps returning us to the people trying to find a way through. The history matters because of what it does to these four lives, and the production never lets us lose sight of that connection.

Chris Abraham’s direction gives the production a remarkable sense of momentum. There is a lot of story to tell, and the three-hour runtime moves with a precision that keeps the many layers of Mistry’s world in motion. The production drops us into the crowded, restless atmosphere of Bombay almost immediately, with Thomas Ryder Payne’s intricate sound design becoming part of the storytelling itself. The city and its political tensions seem to seep into Dina’s apartment through the constant hubbub, passing trains, background static, and voices that remind us that the outside world is never very far away. The sound never overwhelms the people on stage. It makes the apartment feel increasingly surrounded by a country undergoing enormous change, giving their private lives a political atmosphere they cannot escape.

Michael Gianfrancesco’s set creates the physical pressure that the story needs. Dina’s apartment, with doorways rolling in and out like a train car, becomes a small, crowded world in which these four are forced into proximity and gradually discover the possibility of community. The space carries the sense of a life being held together with thread, while Ming Wong’s costumes superbly establish the social circumstances and individuality of the characters without drawing attention away from them. Imogen Wilson’s lighting gives the production room to breathe within that confinement, shifting the atmosphere as the characters move through moments of tenderness, tension, celebration, and devastation. Together, the design elements create a world that feels lived in, politically charged, and increasingly precarious, with the apartment serving as both shelter and witness.

At the centre of that world is Zorana Sadiq as Dina, and her performance gives the production one of its strongest emotional anchors. Dina is fiercely independent, prickly, complicated, and carries the grief of a life that has already demanded too much from her. We aren’t given an enormous backstory, but in a way, that keeps us centred on her broken soul rather than on all the difficult details that might explain her. Sadiq allows us to see the class assumptions and judgments that Dina carries while also giving us the growth that slowly emerges through her relationships with Ishvar, Omprakash, and Maneck. Her apartment becomes an extension of that struggle. She is trying to protect what remains of her life, and Sadiq makes every crack in that protection meaningful.

Anand Rajaram and Ben Yoganathan bring tremendous warmth and humour to Ishvar and Omprakash, two tailors whose friendship becomes one of the production’s most affecting threads. Their circumstances are brutal, and their relationship complicated, but the performances never reduce them to their suffering or their anger. Rajaram and Yoganathan give these men distinct personalities, dignity, and an instinct for survival that makes their growing connection with Dina and Maneck feel genuine. There is an ease between them that allows laughter to exist alongside the harsher realities of the world around them, making their friendship feel like something they are actively building together from scraps of leftover fabric in circumstances that keep trying to pull these seams apart.

Siddharth Sharma’s Maneck brings another dimension to the group. He is a student with a mind reaching beyond the social structures that surround him, and Sharma captures the curiosity and uncertainty of someone trying to imagine a future while increasingly confronting the limits placed upon him. Sharma gives Maneck’s final moments a quiet intensity, and the staging itself is beautifully handled, but I found the emotional groundwork for his final decision a little too loosely constructed. The moment arrives abruptly, making it difficult for the full weight of what has happened to land with the force the production seems to be reaching for. Husein Madhavji and Sugith Varughese also help give the production its broader social and political dimension, moving through the world beyond the apartment and expanding the sense of a society being reshaped around these four lives.

The production never hides the brutality of the system these characters are living under. There is poverty, caste discrimination, political oppression, forced sterilization, degradation, and violence, and some of the scenes become almost unbearably painful because the people we have come to know are now caught directly inside those realities. Abraham does not allow those moments to become theatrical spectacle. The horror lands because we have spent time with the people experiencing it. We know their humour, their irritations, their hopes, and their attempts to build something resembling a home. The political machinery has faces and consequences because the production has made us care about the people standing in its path.

And that brings me back to the question that has been following me through the week. How did I not know this? How can stories this extraordinary exist inside the history we think we understand and still remain outside our everyday awareness? A few days later, I was at a TIFF screening of “Being Heumann“, Siân Heder’s film about Judy Heumann and the disability rights movement, and I found myself asking the same question again.

Ruth Madeley gives a phenomenal, fiercely committed, and detailed performance as Heumann, a woman who knows how to turn determination into action. Mark Ruffalo, as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano, helps establish the political obstacle standing in her way, but Madeley’s Judy is the force that keeps the movement going. At one point, she is unceremoniously crowned Queen Judy because of the proclamations she can make for the group at a moment’s notice. Watching her, I kept thinking that General Judy might have been the better title. At one point, after Heumann takes action, Califano finally demands, “Who is this person?” The question lands because by then Judy Heumann has become impossible for the people in power to ignore. She understands that a cause needs people, organization, persistence, and a willingness to keep going when the answer from those in power is simply no. And Judy has no problem being the person who leads them into battle.

The story centres on the 1977 occupation of a federal building in San Francisco, when Heumann and a growing group of activists demanded meaningful regulations for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The details are astonishing because the obstacles are so concrete. At one point, when police attempt to arrest the protesters, the realization comes that even the jails are not accessible. “You are not the problem, the stairs are the problem,” becomes one of the film’s clearest expressions of the movement’s purpose. The physical barriers are manifestations of a much larger system that has told disabled people they can participate in the American dream while surrounding them with obstacles to actually living within it.

The U-Haul truck scene at the airport and the subsequent drive into Washington, D.C. struck me particularly hard. We have become accustomed to seeing ramps, elevators, sloped curbs, accessible vehicles, and other signs of accessibility in our daily lives. Those things did not simply appear. People fought for them. Heumann and the activists around her were willing to occupy buildings, put their health at risk, travel across the country, attract media attention, and place themselves directly in the path of government resistance because they understood that waiting politely for change could mean waiting forever. When Heumann wheels herself out in front of traffic, demanding to be seen and listened to, the force of that moment is impossible to miss. 

That is where “Being Heumann” becomes something more than an inspirational historical drama. The story is inspirational, certainly, but the film itself understands that inspiration has a responsibility attached to it. Judy Heumann did not fight simply so people could admire her courage decades later. She fought because people were being denied the ability to live fully and participate equally. Heder’s film asks us to take that history into the present and consider what we do when we encounter the next obstacle, the next exclusion, the next injustice that somebody has decided is simply the way things are. And to act.

This is something I have been thinking about repeatedly during TIFF. “The Assassin(s)” opened my eyes to the attempted assassination of South Korean President Park Chung-hee and the journalists and police officers determined to uncover the conspiracy surrounding it and keep democracy alive. “Elsinore“, directed by Simon Stone and led by Andrew Scott, tells the story of Ian Charleson, the “Chariots of Fire” actor who pushed through AIDS to play Hamlet at London’s National Theatre. “Tenzing“, directed by Jennifer Peedom and starring Tom Hiddleston, Willem Dafoe, and Genden Phuntsok, brings the story of Himalayan Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay and his ascent of Everest with Edmund Hillary into the cinematic frame. Three very different stories, three very different pieces of history, yet each one has given me the same feeling: that there is something moving, powerful, and required in discovering these moments and what made the people behind them tick and take action.

I knew walking into A Fine Balance at Crow’s Theatre that I was about to encounter one of the most celebrated Canadian novels of the past fifty years in a new form. But I left thinking about Dina, Ishvar, Omprakash, and Maneck, four people I had spent three hours getting to know inside the cramped walls of an apartment in Bombay, and about the enormous historical forces that had shaped their lives. Somewhere inside that experience was the answer to the question that has been following me: how did I not know this? A Fine Balance and “Being Heumann” both took history out of the distance of headlines and dates and placed these people directly in front of me, people whose lives had been shaped by circumstances I knew about only in the broadest sense. They made me want to know more, to pay closer attention, and to recognize that sometimes the first thing we can do when confronted with stories like these is simply refuse to look away. And then do something to affect change, within ourselves and the world around us.