Takwahiminana is about hyphenated Indigenous identities and delicate romantic relationships.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Title: Takwahiminana
Written by: Matthew MacKenzie
Performed by: Michaela Washburn, Prithvi Castelino, Vanessa Mangar, Kajaanan Navaratnam, Swetha Pararajasingam, Naveeni Rasiah
Director: Mike Payette
Company: Punctuate! Theatre, presented by Soulpepper Theatre Company
Venue: Soulpepper Theatre Company
City: Toronto
Year: Until May 11, 2025
The plight of the ortolan bunting, a delicate Eurasian songbird, is well-known in foodie circles.
First, you catch the bird, likely in the south of France. You trap it in the dark, stuff it with figs and grain and drown it in brandy. You cover your head with a cloth, then eat the cooked bird whole, bones and all.
It’s a gastronomic experience so patrician it was parodied in the first season of Succession; it’s also wreaked such havoc on French bird populations that the ortolan is now considered endangered.
According to food enthusiasts, there is no better pleasure than the juicy tang of a deep-fried bird marinated in booze. And hey, maybe that’s true — I can’t say I’m in any particular hurry to try it.
But in Takwahiminana, Matthew MacKenzie’s latest play about hyphenated Indigenous identities and delicate romantic relationships, the ortolan serves as a convincing metaphor: The person feeding you with affection and love might want to nourish you, to protect you from the world, to save you from the claws of hunger. Or, they might want to fatten you up, with the goal of chewing you down to your least recognizable self.
A sequence involving ortolans — and their North American chickadee cousins, which are gamier and less tender after evolving to survive Canadian winters — is one of the most successful parts of Takwahiminana, which follows a Métis woman named Sharon (Michaela Washburn) through her childhood in India and adolescent “homecoming” to Alberta, a place with ancestral significance for her, but not much by way of comfort after the death of her mother.
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When Sharon finds herself at a dinner party with Claude, her lover, on the anniversary of their extramarital affair, the ortolan carries new significance, new heft. Childhood memories of being ostracized by Indian classmates come bubbling up, along with teenage scenes of more hard-core bullying.
It’s an interesting premise brought to life with evident care for the intercultural implications of the work by director Mike Payette, who uses a chorus of Bharatanatyam dancers to illustrate Sharon’s inner thoughts and turmoils. In one vignette, the dancers are monkeys; in another, brash school children. Every so often, they punctuate Sharon’s meaningful emotional moments with foot stomps, finger clicks and hand gestures; each time, the dance sends a message about a psyche split between countries.
On the technical side of things, André du Toit’s lighting design is uniquely impactful thanks to set designer Dawn Marie Marchand’s fringed backdrop — colours twinkling behind the curtain look like the northern lights, even stars, making for a visual world that is subtle, textured and layered.
It’s a shame, then, that Takwahiminana struggles to take off because of MacKenzie’s choice to distance Sharon from the events of the play by placing all of her dialogue in the third-person. Sharon doesn’t do things herself; she narrates having done them as if watching from outside her own body. That’s an established convention of Canadian playwriting — Erin Shields’s Paradise Lost memorably separates Adam and Eve from their actions using a similar rhetorical trick — but here, that choice makes Sharon feel ungrounded and wispy, more an idea than a living, breathing person.
Washburn does what she can in the role, but the third-person remove of MacKenzie’s writing leads to a few strident moments early on in the play. Sharon, recalling her earliest days with Claude, reaches an emotional fever pitch in the smoke of her memories and struggles to come back down to earth. On opening night, Washburn also stumbled over a fair number of lines, interrupting the flow of the writing and further distancing Sharon from her actions.
Some of MacKenzie’s script is quite strong, and even beautiful in places: The surprisingly lyrical, deeply sensory ortolan sequence and the denouement, in which Sharon reclaims her genealogy and overall sense of self, come to mind. There’s a great monologue about pickle jars, too, in which MacKenzie’s trademark dry sense of humour gets the chance to spark.
Takwahiminana‘s ending mirrors First Métis Man of Odesa —MacKenzie’s last play, written in collaboration with wife, Mariya Khomutova — with a blanket of stars and gentle ruminations on ancestry, storytelling and the land. Thanks to Amelia Scott’s luminous video design, Takwahiminana‘s final beats land with a pleasant, life-affirming echo — indeed, the back half of the play is much stronger than its opening scenes.
Takwahiminana deserves a revisit, and I hope it gets one. The combination of MacKenzie’s typically rock-solid playwriting, Payette’s direction and Anoshinie Muhundarajah’s Bharatanatyam choreography (as well as the terrific five dancers) ought to be excellent. But despite the visual sweetness of Payette’s production, the rhetoric of Sharon’s story as written feels almost like the bones in an ortolan: a touch awkward to navigate, and tough to digest.
