Multidisciplinary artist Srutika Sabu’s new work Neptune’s With a Fish will premiere as part of Paprika Festival on May 14 and 17, 2025 at Native Earth’s Aki Studio in Toronto.
The show will be on stage in time for Asian Heritage Month, appropriately enough, since it deals with the toll that points based immigration system takes through generations, along with the myth of the Asian model minority.
The Paprika Festival is youth-led, and offers a professional platform, mentorships, paid opportunities and more to emerging artists and arts administrators.
We talked to doctor turned clown Srutika Sabu about Neptune’s With a Fish and more.
Srutika Sabu, doctor turned clown
Malayali-Canadian Srutika Sabu began by studying medicine, but took a detour into clowning after an existential crisis, and became a multidisciplinary artist.
She was born in North India to parents from South India, and moved to Brampton, Ontario at age seven, where the family stayed until she was about 15. The family subsequently moved to New Jersey. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in biotechnology and transnational feminism at Rutgers University, she entered medical school in New York City.
But then… Srutika came to Toronto, and began studying clowning.
Training at Sweet Action Theatre, she learned how to reveal her drag king persona, Santosh Santosh — aka Tosh — a character who starred in her 2024 Toronto Fringe show 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go, directed by Ken Hall (The Umbrella Academy). That show will be remounted at Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival from May 30-31 in Vancouver.
Srutika has performed at Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival, Montreal Sketchfest, and WTFestival, and she is the winner of the 2025 Mahendra Joshi Playwriting Competition.
For 2025, she is part of Paprika Festival’s Creative Producers Unit, as well as Buddies in Bad Times’ Emerging Creators Unit, Theatre Gargantua’s Artist Roundtable, and Nightwood Theatre’s Shadow Residency in Fundraising.
Neptune’s With a Fish
The show’s premise is autobiographical — at least in part. Chandra is a med school grad who has been banished to a magical version of Toronto. Dreams of her promising future collapse as she’s forced to turn to an uncertain alliance with a talking egg who happens to be annoying to the extreme.
It’s a musical comedy fuelled by clown energy, a sense of the absurd, and a realistically emotional basis in the myths of South Asian exceptionalism, and much more.
Srutika Sabu is responsible for the book, animation, music and lyrics for the show. She performs as Chandra, with Amrutha Krishnan as the Egg.
Srutika Sabu: The Interview
“I kind of grew up in different places,” Sabu says. She explains that her parents had decided to move to New Jersey from Brampton during the financial crisis of 2008.
After beginning her studies, she says she had a “crisis of intention”. Initially, she thought she’d take a year out of med school to deal with it.
“That meant coming back to Toronto.” As she points out, her visa only allowed her to study in the US, but in any case, she anticipated that after a year or so, she’d be back to med school.
Then, the COVID pandemic hit, and, along the way, her desire to study medicine waned. “I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do next.”
Though she’d opted for science and medicine when it came to her studies, her heart had always been in the arts. She wanted to lead a more creative life.
“I never gave myself permission to do that,” she says. “I was always an artsy kid, but what I didn’t expect was to be a late bloomer theatre kid.”
Sabu says she stumbled on acting classes in passing, and discovered the art of theatrical clowning.
“I was like what is this?” she recalls. It was 2023. “I took my first clown class. I don’t know what kept me doing it.” Clowning incorporated many aspects that made her uncomfortable at first, like looking people in the eye, and showing vulnerability. “It was a true trial by fire.”
That’s when she came up with drag king Santosh Santosh, and her first show. She got a last minute spot at the Toronto Fringe, and put together a show in about three weeks.
“It was really truly a collaborative effort between three unemployed people,” she says. “I realized, I am a performer and clown now.”
Since then, she’s branched into many different aspects of production and staging. That journey forms the basis for Neptune’s With a Fish.
“[It’s] a magical, musical retelling of the past three years,” she says, “a very winding journey,” she adds. “My mom tears her hair out everyday.”
On Stage
The show is directed by Gordon Neil (Sweet Action Theatre), with Amrutha Krishnan (Mahjong Mafia Comedy).
“We all met in a clown class,” Srutika recalls. “It’s a wonderful sort of incubator space. The director of this piece is actually one of the clown teachers,” she adds. “It’s like the theatre school I never had. I’ve using the mentors that I have from these spaces. It’s such a joyous process to work with all of them.”
She calls it an all hands on deck approach. “We’re all very new at this. We’re not traditional theatre kids.”
She enjoys the collaborative aspects of theatre making. “That’s what I love about theatre art making. Clown for me is very liberating.”
The immigration system and the fallout from it underpins the comedy, music, and absurd aspects of the show.
“It’s interesting. I’m like the product of two immigration systems,” Srutika notes. She became a Canadian citizen after immigrating to Brampton, but also lived in the US for a decade as a foreign citizen.
“Even my ability to stay in the US was dependent on continuing the [medical] residency,” she explains.
Her parents went through the points-based immigration system in both countries. “It was predicated on the fact that both of them studied in engineering,” she says. It created a difficult situation where they had to compensate for the limitations of their relatively weaker passports. “My sister and I, we wouldn’t have that privilege.”
Her mother’s anxiety about her occupation, and quitting med school in particular, stemmed from the fact that everything that led to their North American lifestyle hinged on their own occupations. Their sacrifices led to the situation where their own children had more choices than they did.
“It’s real trauma that they have,” she says. “I’m always aware of, how can I make it more sustainable, not just for me, but for other people,” she adds. “Making art shouldn’t be just for the privileged.”
Srutika says she’s not immune from her parents’ fears. “I do get anxious about — what am I doing?”
She says that many people have approached her after a show to thank her for what she’s doing and saying publicly.
“I use those stories to talk about a lot of that generational stuff,” she says.
“I feel like certain stories are more universal than we think.”
- Find more details about The Paprika Festival, performances, and tickets, [HERE].
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