The experience of reading a play can never be as amazing as seeing it performed live, but some plays come pretty close. The best plays to read are the ones where things are so vividly described you can almost imagine watching it performed, and that imagining only makes you wish all the more you can experience it in person. Cliff Cardinal’s Huff & Stitch and Kat Sandler’s Punch Up are two such books, where so much of the magic is in the rhythm of the language, and I’d love to see people bring it to life on stage.

Huff & Stitch by Cliff Cardinal

Huff and Stitch are two powerful one-person plays by award-winning Indigenous playwright Cliff Cardinal.

Huff is about Wind and his two brothers Huff and Charles coping with their mother’s suicide, their father’s abuse and the machinations of Trickster. It’s an intense, visceral play that begins with Wind on stage with a plastic bag over his head, duct-taped to his throat, his hands cuffed behind his back, and the pace never lets up from there. Audience members are made complicit as well, as Wind talks about suicide then walks up to an audience member to request they remove the cuffs and hold on to the plastic bag. “Don’t give it back no matter what I say,” he says. “I need you.”

All this within the first few minutes, and as the play goes on, we learn about what has brought Wind to that point. It’s a tragic, raw story about family and growing up in the residential school system, and incredibly powerful on the page. The actor playing Wind also plays the other parts — his brothers, his father, Trickster — and the incredible skill to pull that off unfortunately cannot be captured in the script, but must be amazing to see in person.

In Stitch, Kylie Grandview is a young single mom and porn star whose fervently religious mother threatens to take her baby away. It’s presented as a series of clicks, mimicking internet browsing and again making the audience complicit in Kylie’s experience as we choose to “click” through a new scene in her life.

Stitch is funny and sad at the same time; Kylie’s yeast infection is personified and acts as the voice of her subconscious, which is just hilariously tragic and so fitting yet so wrong. The pace feels frenetic, and the lines sometimes blurred where one experience ends and another begins. For example, the part where Kylie performs a rape scene for her job is structured so that it’s unclear at first if the assault is real or staged, which just highlights all the sexism, exploitation and general messed-up-ness Kylie faces in her life.

Punch Up by Kat Sandler

Punch Up is hilarious! In a nutshell, from the back cover:

The Most Pathetic Guy Ever kidnaps the Funniest Man Alive to make the Saddest Girl in the World laugh.

Duncan falls in love with Brenda, a woman he sees about to kill herself. He makes a deal with her — if he can get her to laugh at dinner that night, she promises not to follow through, but if he can’t make her laugh, he’ll kill her himself. She agrees, and since he needs help, Duncan then kidnaps one of his favourite comedians Pat, chains him to a desk with a typewriter, and demands that Pat help him come up with the perfect routine. The irony is that Duncan is unintentionally funny — he’s a bread tester at a factory whose job is to sample every 41st loaf to test its density — but he’s horribly unfunny when he actually makes an effort.

The introductory stage directions instruct performers to “punch up” the jokes if they can come up with better ones, and with regard to pace is the laconic directive: “Pick it up.” Even on the page, it reads like a stand up routine, with brisk patter and overlapping dialogue punctuated by strategic little moments of silence where I can just imagine one of the actors pulling a Jim Halpert look.

I was in hysterics just reading the play, it’s SO FUNNY! I’d love to see it in person, and see actors bring the comedy to life in a way I may not be able to imagine. Someone please stage this play soon, and in the meantime, even just the book version is an awesome comedy fix.

+

Thank you to Playwrights Canada Press for copies of these books in exchange for honest reviews.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is such a beautifully evocative novel that will make you long to savour pu-erh tea. I’ve never tasted pu-erh myself, but the way See describes it makes it sound like such a precious, earthy and rich beverage, and I love the image of the leaves aging naturally in the sun then being packed into cakes for transport. I also love the way See describes the tea cakes being so precious that Chinese women in ancient times would take them along on long journeys to hand down to their children.

The story revolves around Li-yan and her family, Akha people in a remote Yunnan mountain village, who produce tea. Their world changes when a man in an automobile arrives in their village and offers them riches in return for their tea leaves and labour in producing high quality pu-erh tea. As one of the few educated women in her village, Li-yan is tasked with translating for the stranger, and is dazzled by the potential of the life he offers. When Li-yan gives birth out of wedlock, she wraps her daughter in a blanket with a tea cake and leaves her at a nearby orphanage.

Fast forward several years into the future, where Li-yan moves out of her village and pursues a career in tea connoisseurship, and her daughter Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl who is nonetheless curious about where she came from and what the tea cake means.

Pu-erh tea cake. Source: http://www.esgreen.com.

Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is such a beautiful story about family and tradition, and about uncovering one’s roots and finding one’s home. But what I love most about it is the glimpse See gives into Akha culture and the history of pu-erh tea. I love the depiction of the traditions around tea making and tea drinking, and the history of how appreciation for this tradition has diluted over time. I highly recommend reading this book, preferably with a cup of tea in hand.

And if you’re curious, here’s a video on how to brew pu-erh tea.

+

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

Described as “steampunk Jumanji with a Middle Eastern flair,” The Gauntlet is a fun, fantasy middle grade/young adult fiction within Simon and Schuster’s new Salaam Reads imprint. I was looking forward to it since I first heard about Salaam Reads books for Muslim children by Muslim authors, and I’m happy to report that the final book did not disappoint.

During Farah’s twelfth birthday party, she and her friends Alex and Essie discover a mysterious board game in Farah’s bedroom. Due in part to the mischief of Farah’s younger brother Ahmed, Farah and her friends find themselves diving deep into the world of the game, on a mission to find Ahmed and take him home.

I love the world-building in The Gauntlet, and how the world of the boardgame, unlike the chaotic jungle of Jumanji, feels almost clock-like in its mechanical precision. There’s a logic to the challenges being offered, and to the way the players must navigate the world, but there’s also an urgent race against time, as each puzzle comes with a finite amount of sand in an hourglass within which the puzzle must be completed. The story felt very much like a video game — one challenge involving characters having to throw items from platforms before the platforms disappear, and as a reader, it’s almost a breathless experience just to get through that chapter.

I also love the Middle Eastern and South Asian elements in the story. For example, Farah and her family are Bangladeshi, and there’s a lot of descriptions of South Asian desserts that her mother makes for the party. Within the game itself, one of the challenges even involves South Asian delicacies, none of which I think I’ve ever tried, but am now very eager to taste. Farah and her friends also talk a lot about evil mischief being caused by djinn, and this has a heavy influence on the game.

Within all the action and excitement, there’s a lot of heart in this story. Farah’s love for her brother clearly drives her throughout her adventures, and Alex and Essie’s love for Farah keeps them fiercely loyal throughout the game. Even the origins of the game itself is rooted in love, and we see the tragedy in how the best intentions can be twisted into something dangerous.

The Gauntlet is such a fantastic book. It’s written for younger readers but will appeal to older readers as well. Also, how awesome is it that the main character wears a hijab, and that this is not just displayed on the cover, it is also brought up in the story itself?

+

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.