Before a word of dialogue is uttered, it’s clear that playwright Madhuri Shekar’s “Dhaba on Devon” will be an immersive, emotionally powerful production.
The lights are barely down when the action starts: We’re in a restaurant kitchen where a fraught, wordless interaction is taking place. A sous-chef anxiously tests a sauce. The owner insists it’s trash. The two are more than just employee and boss; they’re father and daughter. There’s conflict, disappointment, frustration, fear and a thick miasma of rage hanging over the silence.
Initially slated for a run in 2020 and canceled by COVID, “Dhaba on Devon” is finally getting its world premiere at Glencoe’s Writers Theatre in partnership with TimeLine Theatre. Directed by Chay Yew, it’s a sprawling, multigenerational story of diaspora and maintaining cultural tradition. It unfolds over the clattering trays and hissing burners in the kitchen of the Devon Canteen, a family-owned Sindhi restaurant on a stretch of Devon Avenue known for decades as Little India.
Although it’s set entirely in 2017 Chicago, “Dhaba on Devon” is an epic of global history and politics, pared down to their most personal impact. Little India is vanishing as the drama unfolds, disappearing under the relentless economics of gentrification. The Devon Canteen is in foreclosure.
Shekar’s script would benefit from editing, particularly in a prolonged scene that has the ensemble packing up an entire kitchen, pan by pan, dish by dish. Some of the fraught, intense arguments about the restaurant’s ultimate fate become an inch repetitive. Those are somewhat quibbling flaws.
“Dhaba on Devon” (“dhaba” is a Hindi word that translates roughly to “hole in the wall” and refers to small restaurants and street food vendors found by truck stops in India and Pakistan) tackles assimilation, family, religious identity, immigration and the inevitably tragic breakdown of the human body. That’s a lot for a 95-minute production, but Shekar’s intricate drama packs a repeated emotional punch. It is also consistently, incongruously funny.
The Madhwanis are the heart of “Dhaba.” Neeraj (Anish Jethmalani) owns the Canteen and is determined to keep it open, even as foreclosure proceedings and his Parkinson’s disease reach their end game.
Neeraj’s daughter Rita (Tina Muñoz Pandya) spends her days toiling in the kitchen and failing to meet her father’s impossible standards. Rita’s older sister Sindhu (Arya Daire) is a world away, a high-priced consultant with sleek suits and seemingly little connection to her roots. Adil Jaisinghani (Museen Jahan), Rita’s and Sindhu’s uncle and the brother of Neeraj’s late wife, is the head of a snack empire centered on Indian cookies. Finally, there’s Luz Fuentes (Isa Arciniegas), a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipient and line cook.
Through the Madhwanis, the toll of British Colonialism in India snaps into focus. In short: Under the 200-year rule of the British Raj, the Sindhis were people of India’s northwestern Sindh province. In 1947, the British ended their occupation, but first they carved out Pakistan from Bengal and Punjab, Muslim-majority areas of India that included the Sindh province.
The Partition displaced more than 14 million people, Hindus fleeing religious persecution in the newly created Pakistan and Muslims fleeing religious persecution in Hindu-majority India. Per the program notes, a million of those refugees were Sindhis. In “Dhaba on Devon,” two of them were Neeraj’s parents.
As he relates in one harrowing passage, his mother’s family was killed trying to cross the new border into India. At one point, he describes how his mother — the sole survivor — made kadi, a yogurt-based curry, in a communal pot under the open sky. As Neeraj describes it, the refugee camp staple was infused by “the flavor of the smoke and the stars.”
Director Yew — artistic director of Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater from 2011 until 2020 — helms with an astute hand and a clear understanding of the dramatic stakes.
The ensemble is unassailable. Jethmalani delivers a towering, wrenching performance that captures both the crushing indignities of a body being corroded by disease as well as the pride of someone who built something beautiful and culturally important, against brutal odds.
Pandya’s Rita nails the frustration and the pressurized anguish that comes from caring for a failing parent and a failing restaurant. As Rita’s sister Sindhu, Daire peels back the layers of her polished facade to reveal a series of small revelations that wholly redefine who she initially seems to be.
Arciniegas’ Luz is also powerful, especially in a moment where she talks about missing her family in the Dominican Republic. She can’t visit them because the U.S. could refuse her reentry. “It’s a weird feeling to be trapped in the country you risked everything to come to,” Luz says in Shekar’s piercing dialogue.
As Adil, Jahan is at once a voice of practical wisdom and a wealthy embodiment of the American Dream.
Shekar has packed a multigenerational, geopolitical saga into “Dhaba on Devon.” You can go in as a scholar of the Partition or completely ignorant of it — either way, “Dhaba on Devon” is an undeniably entertaining rollercoaster where history collides with the present.