It’s 2016, the summer of Brexit, in London. 17-year-old Karya (Yasmin Ranz-Lind) is frustrated with where things stand with her family. Her brother Amir has disappeared. He’s been gone a year, and no one knows where. So the family is suspended in time, not sure how to move forward. Her mother, Ceyda (Roxanna Hope Radja), believes he may have joined ISIS and is trying to convince the police to reopen the case when she finds a video of someone in a ski mask she thinks is her son.
Everything is all about Amir. Karya and her troubles are just invisible in the face of Amir’s disappearance. Even Amir’s ex-girlfriend, Isha (Sara Haider), gets dragged back into the fray by Ceyda going to the police again with her theory. Karya just wants to move on, and yet she, too, wonders about where Amir might be.
What happens next is the crux of how Karya decides to “cope” with the situation. Karya’s best friend, Libby (Alyssa May Gold), kind of goads Karya into chatting up ISIS accounts on Twitter in an effort to find Amir. Karya keeps taking these chats further and further extracting money from men looking for brides. She’s clearly playing with fire, and I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that in this 90-minute play she will get burned.
Teenagers are going to make dumb mistakes in life. But with the internet, those mistakes can escalate in ways they have not imagined. Once a thing is out on the internet, there is no putting it back in the bottle.
Aker is trying to weave together a lot between the era of the internet, Brexit from inside the UK, a family in grief, teen sexuality, and simply being a woman in the world. I understood what she was trying to do, but the connective tissue between Karya and her struggles, and between her mother and her problems, isn’t always clear.
To be fair, a teen who is fumbling to communicate and is unable to articulate what she is feeling is not always the easiest person to follow on stage. That said, Aker has a strong ear for mean teen banter as the friends insult each other and try to exaggerate their maturity and toughness with swearing and sex talk. Ranz-Lind and Gold have a good rapport as their characters stumble through both the normal and the truly unexpected twists of teen life.
A lot of the play is driven by Karya’s online conversations. Yet I feel like we still haven’t come up with an effective language for the internet on stage. Why are these things still so hard to depict? Here, Karya types on her phone, and we hear the disembodied voice of random ISIS Twitter guys while Twitter symbols light up on the wall. It’s not confusing, and it works for what the play needs. But somehow it just still feels very much like an announcement: “We are theatricalizing the internet.”
Another signficant part of the play follows Karya and her mother as they take swimming lessons at a fancy gym. Through these scenes, we realize how much Karya is struggling to understand her own sexual identity as well as her mother’s, as the mother flirts with the instructor (Kario Marcel). Here is where things get a bit more florid in the writing and I’m not sure we gain as much as we should from it.
The tensions between mother and daughter are naturally going to be somewhat oblique (no one saying directly what they mean) but this feels like the least integrated part of the plot.
However, Emmie Finckel’s set is a multilevel tiled room that can double effectively as the swimming pool, the family’s kitchen, charity shop, changing rooms, and the school bathroom. With a gap at the front of the stage, the actors “do laps” and splash around “beneath” the surface making it seem as if they are in a pool (albeit without water). G Clausen’s sharp sound design adds a pool-like echo during the swim lessons making us feel like we’ve been transported there. LED-lined panels move across the room to act as a visual wipe and segment the space at times.
Overall, Fish is asking interesting questions of its characters and leading us to some unexpected places on stage, but I felt responsible for trying to fit too much of the storytelling puzzle together myself.