Kris Vire, Time Out Chicago
Brahman/i , Aditi Brennan Kapil's fascinating piece, is a layered, insightful consideration of Indian-American cultural identity, gender and colonisation that happens to take the form of a stand-up comedy routine. Using the rhythms and tropes of stand-up, the character recounts a journey to the stage: Asked to choose a gender assignment once old enough, young Brahman went with boy until he was 14 and started developing breasts; in high school, Brahmani decided she'd try on presenting as a girl. Kapil masterfully weaves this personal history with sharp observations about Hindu tradition and the British colonization of India, with anecdotes like Brahman/i's mother's obsession with British-beige interior design motifs slyly suggesting the ways a culture can remain colonized long after the occupation has ended. Presented here in a smart collaboration between Silk Road Rising and About Face Theatre, Brahman/i hinges on a fiery, magnetic central performance by Fawzia Mirza, who pins down just the right kind of dangerous charisma needed to spin this tale. Mirza's accompanied by Damian Conrad as a backup musician whose bass riffs break up Brahman/i's beats, and whose relationship with the title character shows more and more complexity as the evening wears on; there's a bit of the dynamic of Hedwig and the Angry Inch's Hedwig and Yitzhak to these two. Incisive and informative, Brahman/i knows just how to work a room.
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Raymond Rehayem, Newcity Stage
This gal’s got some real balls. Is that too blue for you? Sorry, I just couldn't resist such a nice opening. Oh, she’s got one of those too. Lest you think I’m being too irreverent, be advised that the protagonist of Brahman/i is frequently in your face about the uncommonly dual genitalia s/he possesses. Portrayed by actress Fawzia Mirza in a commanding and at times fierce near-solo turn in About Face Theatre/Silk Road Rising’s downtown production, the titular character delights – like any good comedian – in confronting the audience. Like the Hindu concept of Brahman, our hero/ine in this play escapes gender classification. S/he flirts with such designation – and with some of the audience as well – but don’t expect any easy answers. Presented in the guise of stand-up comedy, writer Aditi Brennan Kapil’s entertaining, occasionally provocative show is a treatise on the intersections of personal and cultural boundaries – male/female, colonizer/colonized, history/mythology, science/superstition, nationhood/marriage, adolescence/adulthood – and much of it is wildly successful. To say Mirza is convincing in this persona is an understatement. Mirza is a captivating guide through the myriad interwoven topics Kapil dissects in her amusing and thoughtful script.
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Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
It is a boy or is it a girl? That, as we learn from the title character in Aditi Brennan Kapil’s flourish-filled, identity-swirling play, “Brahman/i” (subtitled “A One-Hijra Stand Up Comedy Show”), was the perfectly natural, yet altogether bedeviling question posed by an aunt when, years earlier, she visited the hospital after the birth. And therein lies the crux of the matter in Kapil’s exceptionally clever (fictional) work that, as its producers — Silk Road Rising and About Face Theatre — have neatly described it, “has been written by a female playwright of mixed Indian and Bulgarian ancestry, told from the perspective of a South Asian American intersex person, and performed by Fawzia Mirza, a South Asian Muslim queer woman.” Mirza, a petite but athletic actress with a sharply sardonic edge, and a persona that can shift from boyish to glam, also happens to give a tour de force performance in the role under Andrew Volkoff’s direction. Throughout, Mirza gets the briefest breaks courtesy of guitarist Damian Conrad, whose crucial spoken line recalls the classic words spoken by Joe E. Brown at the end of Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot”: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
Read the entire review online HERE.