The Mississauga Multilingual Fringe Festival (MMFF) is back.
Billed as the only multilingual fringe festival in North America, the MMFF is run by SAWITRI Theatre Group, who for over two decades have platformed performing artists from the South Asian community in the Greater Toronto Area. While the festival is heavy on performances from artists from this diaspora, the MMFF provides a lottery-based platform for artists of all backgrounds to tell the stories that matter to them, in the languages they feel that they need to be told in. (English translations don’t accompany all productions.)
Week one of the festival is presented at AN1 studios on Cawthra Road, while week two will unfold at the Sampradaya Theatre on Ridgeway Drive. During this second week, there’s also complementary programming including a small visual arts exhibition and an amateur singing competition featuring a performance by local band Maple Masala.
Each week features six productions; like last year, I attended every show from week one.
The Big One (English)
Written by James Balcom and Amelia Landels, The Big One examines eco-anxiety. Geena Lox (played by Landels) is a young woman with an after-school tutoring job in Vancouver. Through her three primary-school students, played by Nora Alexander, Rehan Sivagnansundram, and Seroon Arax, Geena learns of the titular “Big One” — an apocalyptic earthquake that at any moment could rock the Pacific coast. The earthquake is a statistical inevitability, and Geena’s fear of it drives the emotional beats of the story as she looks for support from her sister Darcy (Gabrielle Casha).
This play is intelligently conceived. Every scene develops the character’s relationships with precision. Despite consistent depictions of ecological grief, there are plenty of comedic breaks that capture the general detached pessimism that so much of Generation Z shares.
Landel in particular brings a West Coast coolness to Geena’s non-committal, sarcastic personality, and playful misandry (which is made essential to the plot).
Directors Balcom and Anjali Gautamadasa astutely take advantage of the AN1 stage’s intimate layout. When actors leave a scene, they retreat into audience chairs and remain visible in the periphery. It’s a brilliant decision that each player remains in character while offstage: Alexander scratches away at their notebook, Sivagnansundran fiddles with his pens, Arax reads a book.
While Max Kingsbury’s live keyboard playing provides the show with ample atmosphere, the music often drowns out the dialogue. And there are a few scenes that are staged such that I was looking at the backs of heads.
We don’t give star ratings at Intermission. But The Big One definitely measures high on the Richter scale.
Ek Cutting Chai (Hindi)
I’ve always had an issue with people who have an issue with the phrase “chai tea”. It’s not tautological. Etymologically, the word refers to any tea — but semantically, chai unqualified exclusively refers to a specific tealeaf-based beverage, distinguished by the fact that it’s infused with milk and spices during the brewing process. All across the subcontinent, historically, and today, chai does not simply mean tea; it signals a method of preparation that reflects the beverage’s history. My chai pedantism was in good company in this performance from the minds of chai-mistress Malav Naik and writer-performer Deval Soni.
Ek Cutting Chai (or A Half Cup of Chai) takes the form of a bhavai, an ancient form of folk-theatre from Gujrat. Soni plays Ranglo, a folk stock character used to deliver social commentary via comedy. He is accompanied by his stock female counterpart, Rangli, portrayed by Naik.
With his enchanting oral performance, Soni takes the audience to the historic city of Ahmedabad. There, we roam Manek Chowk: a humble vegetable market by morning that becomes a bustling street food hub by night. Nearby is the Jama Masjid, below which Ranglo’s grandfather used to own a chai cafe. The characters we hear about in the story showcase cherished and derided archetypes from differing strata of society — all of whom participate in the same cultural practice.
For South Asians, the consumption of chai is both casual and ritualized. Ek Cutting Chai moves past the consequences of colonialism and celebrates what has become a multinational institution.
You also get a cup from Naik before the show, and it might be worth attending just for that.
Two Voices (English)
The premise of this comedy from writer-director Krithika Aravindan is simple. We, the audience, accompany Maya (played by Aravindan) as she decides between two men. Her options? AJ (Calvin Pereira), a politically incorrect real estate mogul who’s a set-up courtesy of her mother; or Vikram, her creepy ex who’s now moved to Toronto to become a screenwriter. The play features a choose-your-own-adventure format, where at certain points in the narrative the actors freeze before making a decision, and a narrator (Sidhanth Sampath) walks on stage to deliver a few quips and converse with the audience. We then get to vote on which option the characters on stage pursue.
During each deliberation, however, the narrator advocates for one option and actively dissuades the audience from the alternative — quickly tearing away the illusion of participation. At one point during the show I attended, he went so far as admitting the cast has only conceptualized the plan for one of the options and asking us to change our votes.
Overall, the characterizations could be stronger. Aravindan attempts to give Maya some personality: primarily the fact that she’s highly indecisive. But the running gag of her male scene partner ignoring her by scrolling on his phone while she talks means we don’t get any scenes in which the focus is actually on our lead. And neither of Maya’s suitors are ever particularly likeable. Audience members routinely told the narrator that they want Maya to stop talking to both of them. This makes her eventual decision to break out of the supposed audience’s choice format and make the final decision herself fall flat, since her character is still choosing a mediocre man, rather than gaining any sort of autonomy.
Still, the play’s format is engaging enough, and Aravindan is charming as Maya.
How Do You Remember? (English)
Do you remember all the moments that made you?
Through a series of six scenes, this autobiographical experimental performance from Anu Radha Verma explores Queer history in Mississauga and the GTA, especially among the South Asian diaspora. On a bedroom set, she recounts historical events from her archival graduate research, as well as episodes from her own life growing up as a Queer person in a community that often shuns 2SLGBTQIA+ identities.
We learn about Verma’s grandfather’s role as a freedom fighter during the British Raj, when he was imprisoned in a Foucauldian jail. She teaches the audience about the pioneering advocacy organization Gay Equality Mississauga (GEM), and a local arts festival called Desh Pardesh that was active through the ‘90s. She also narrates memories from her teenage years, including an attempt to run away from home, and violence she experienced when she was sent away to India.
Verma performs confidently. She speaks over a series of projected images and archival materials, and ideas blend seamlessly from scene to scene thanks to compositions from the Toronto electronic music group LAL. The busy bedroom filled with books, trinkets, and stickers did draw me away at times — but it might have been even more distracting if Verma didn’t command the audience’s attention as powerfully as she did.
How Do You Remember? is a memoir that goes beyond a single person’s life: as Verma shares her own story, she’s sure to invoke the names of those that came before her.
DéjàVu (English/Hindi)
Officer Jack “JD” Daniels (Siva Pemmasani) is the greatest cop from Cawthra to Dixie. His new rookie, “Bud” Budweiser (Nihar Trivedi) wants to be just like him — aiming to become the “most bestest” cop from Mavis to McLaughlin. But when the two arrive at the scene of a bank robbery masterminded by JD’s archnemesis Captain Morgan (Siddhanth Sampath), a shootout ends in JD dying, until he wakes up to relive the day all over again. The narrative then consists of JD trying to escape the time loop by finishing a day without dying.
This playful Groundhog Day premise makes for an entertaining watch.
I really enjoyed Trivedi’s energy; Bud’s excitement about his new job is infectious and endearing. The show’s use of a film-style montage to demonstrate the multiple attempts at escaping the time loop is effective and helps to avoid repetitive monotony. Another highlight among the cast is Dhaarna Anand who plays… the bullet fired from Captain Morgan’s gun. Yes, I’m serious, and yes, the concept works.
However, the show suffers from a lack of cohesion. On the night I attended, lighting changes were constantly out of sync, and the actors often spoke over each other, mumbled, and repeated their lines.
The performance ended abruptly, with Pemmasani telling the audience that the cast would prepare more for the next show at the festival. Conversations with the cast after the show confirmed that this was not a joke — but the ludicrousness of such an ending felt utterly natural considering the play’s flirtation with the absurd.
Bhatkta Musafir (Hindustani)
Life can’t get much better for Jay Bhoi. He’s just gotten married and finished up his master’s degree in physics; his dad has gotten him a cushy job. But when a big mistake at work leads to an embarrassing confrontation with his boss, Jay decides he needs to become a self-made man and leaves India to move abroad.
Bhatkta Musafir (or Wandering Traveller) is a piece of storytelling theatre, written by Bhoi and formatted as a qissa session. The qissa is a Persianate-Indic storytelling form in which the storyteller weaves an elaborate tale for their listeners. It often includes themes of love, home, and belonging.
Jay speaks from the perspective of a fictionalized version of himself. He creates scenes emblematic of the immigrant story: deciding to leave home, getting documents in order, saying goodbye to his family, pursuing immigration via education, and struggling to adjust to life in Canada.
Bhoi clutches a notebook and moves around miming his story with grace. The entire performance is accompanied by a soothing musical soundscape that has a lulling effect. He punctuates his narration with rich original poetry recitations that meditate on the difficulty of verbalizing emotions.
Throughout the performance, we hear the refrain, “جیسے دل پگھلتا ہے، الفاظ بھی پگھل جاتے ہیں / जैसे दिल पिघलता है, अल्फाज़ भी पिघल जाते हैं।” — or, “As the heart melts, words melt away too.”
The 2026 Mississauga Multilingual Fringe Festival runs until August 23. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Sulaiman Hashim Khan
Sulaiman Hashim Khan is a student at Osgoode Hall Law School. He was previously the theatre columnist at The Varsity — the student newspaper at the University of Toronto, where he studied English. Sulaiman has a love all things literary. And he has a particular interest in stories that are set in and/or grow out of the Greater Toronto Area.
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