In a Mughlai restaurant in Toronto, three lives intertwine. As Ayub, one of its employees, is cleaning up, a mysterious cab driver walks in and shatters his peace, leaving Ayub to confront reality, the family he’s left behind and the dreams long abandoned.
Playwright and novelist Anosh Irani’s Behind the Moon will be staged from March 27–April 6 at Vancity Culture Lab, presented by Touchstone Theatre.
The play is the product of Irani’s curiosity in his own writing — what story are his characters still trying to tell him even after the work is done, and how can he honour that?
Irani, a former UBC creative writing student and a current professor in the program, based Behind the Moon off a short story he had written — and that story was initially intended to expand the story of Abdul, a character in another one of Irani’s plays, The Men in White. In that play, Abdul had a monologue about working in an Indian restaurant that Irani never suspected would stick with him for as long as it did. He wasn’t done with the character yet, nor was Abdul done with him.
“Even after the play was done, the character kept haunting me,” said Irani. “I think it's a blessing when that happens, when someone or something doesn't leave you … it's almost like a magnetic force that pulls you in.”
He decided to explore the inner life of this character in the short story called “Behind the Moon,” which was published in Granta magazine — the play emerged a few years later, when Irani was commissioned to create work for Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre.
“[Behind the Moon is] the character's journey from The Men in White, which was a play, to a short story and to a play again. That seems to happen in my work. They show up again in a completely different genre, in a different form, but I can trace it back to something I wrote years ago,” he said.
The play Behind the Moon became significantly different from the short story, though the character remained the same. Irani said the play looks to the story as a “point of inspiration,” rather than an adaptation.
“There is a part of [the characters] that is still unexplored. I had a lot to discover,” Irani said. “I look for a point of pain in my characters. How are they wounded? … From that, you start carving it again instead of looking at transposing something.”
When asked about how playwriting impacted his work as a novelist, Irani described how theatre has taught him the value of giving characters a sense of urgency and drive.
“The mistake fiction writers sometimes make is they describe things, and they stay in a moment too long, it’s too static,” he said. “If you do that in a play, it’s over. One minute of boredom on stage feels like an hour.”
Irani values how longtime collaborator and Behind the Moon director Lois Anderson shares his appreciation of action-driven writing.
“She understands urgency and intention. Like me, she doesn't like to intellectualize the text too much. I think the writing is intelligent for sure, but I don’t like prolonged intellectual discussions about backstory, as this is a living, breathing thing.”
On the origins of the play’s setting, Irani shared a memory of a restaurant in Toronto he had found himself eating in one day — to him, it was the exact kind of place Behind the Moon’s Ayub would work in.
“While I was sitting there, I started making notes, physical descriptions. It's not so much even the physicality of it — it's what the physicality of it reflects about the character's state of mind and the impact it has on him,” said Irani.
From there, questions began to arise around what these characters had to discover within the restaurant. Irani’s main goal was for these characters to haunt audiences long after they leave the theatre, as they had once haunted him.
“At the end of the day, every person will interpret things differently. Of course, there’s a collective impact that the play definitely has, but I don’t think about the audience that much. I honour the characters — I think that, in a way, is honouring the audience,” he said.
“We are examining the human condition, at the end of it. That’s the whole purpose … what it means to live in this chaotic world, what it means when you lose someone or someone betrays you [or] shows you kindness or an act of brotherhood, of faith. That’s what [we’re] examining.”
Tickets for Behind the Moon are available online.
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