Nautanki Bazaar in association with Factory Theatre: An IMM-Permanent Resident. Written and performed by Neha Poduval and Himanshu Sitlani; directed by Miquelin Rodriguez. Studio Theatre at Factory Theatre, Toronto. Continues until March 22, 2026; tickets here.
What is undeniable is that An IMM-Permanent Resident — written and performed by Neha Poduval and Himanshu Sitlani and directed by Miquelon Rodriguez — has a pure heart.
The opening scene immediately illustrates the comical dynamic of the couple, and the form of the play. Neha tries to mediate but, along with pop-up ads, Himashu interrupts her flow, storming in singing, and asks her to pause so they can fill out the lengthy forms for her permanent residency.
She’s visibly angry, they lose their sweet connection, but he steps up to calm her down; assuaging her anger, allaying her doubts and providing her hope to return on their journey.
“Together,” he yearningly asks, holding his hand out.
“Always,” she, now reassured, resolutely responds, grabbing hold of it.
The Play
Based on their own lives, and developed over ten years through various, the play recreates their experience of their immigration to Canada and narrates their interpretations of it to the audience.
Like Neha, the predictable plot is interrupted by flights of their imagination, featuring homages to genres ranging from westerns to romantic comedies, which make for an entertaining journey that gradually becomes more serious as the rejected applications pile up and their will wavers.
Throughout the show’s 80 minutes, Himanshu’s performance of heartfelt innocence and Neha’s palpable frustration, both of which are intentionally pitched to a Bollywood melodrama, moved the audience to chuckles and awes, since their combined charisma is hard to resist falling for.
Both aspiring theatre artists, they fall in love in Mumbai, which Neha considers home, but where Hemanshu does not see a future for himself. Then they struggle to adjust to Toronto as newlyweds — one whose residential status is secured, the other in bureaucratic limbo.
As with the “IMM” in its title — which is the code used on the forms for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada — the play seeks to represent the psychological effect of the language that surrounds the immigration process and to make us feel the extent of its intrusiveness.
Audience Interaction
In scenes where they ask the audience the questions, Tushar Tukaram Dalvi’s lighting design switches from the golden warmth of a home to the set of a stress-inducing reality show, which is amplified by the score, featuring cues from Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and Wheel of Fortune.
One by one the questions, which range from names and dates to the number of condoms used on their honeymoon, start to take their toll, and their point is made. But, as the play progresses and these scenes recur, that point goes undeveloped; we only see and feel its sheer ridiculousness.
A more compelling digression centers on the acronym “P.R.,” which, at Himanshu’s insistence, the audience chants with him until it sounds like the Hindi word for love: pyaar. For Neha, though, it means waiting, uncertainty and precarity.
Between those two ends, we’re shuffled.
Highlights
The play is the strongest when it depicts the strain the immigration process places on the relationship and staging of Neha’s explosive anger, which is expressed in thrown documents and a heart-shaped cake (set design by Jung-Hye Kim, whose work is always subtle and thoughtful).
In a notable tiff, the amiable couple argue in Hindi, which goes untranslated, so the audience members who cannot comprehend the content can focus on the universal emotions instead. They urge us to see how the strife of their circumstances resonates beyond the limits of language.
Playing It For Laughs
The musician Drake, whose 2016 single “Hotline Bling” gave Neha a way into conceiving of what Toronto was like, is a prominent reference here, though, with his waning reputation in recent years, this dates the material, which also liberally uses “fuck” for emphasis, features gags that poke fun at unstable networks on video calls, and earnestly perpetuates immigrant tropes.
It is consistent with the play, then, to represent archetypes and stereotypes but never develop it deeply, neither subverting, transforming or commenting on it, playing it for laughs or shock factor rather than as opportunities for analysis.
Their privilege as an able-bodied, middle class, heterosexual couple in the system goes unrecognized, and stories from other immigrants fail to appear, since they seem to exist in an insular world populated only by family and official workers.
As performers, they have done the work to step outside of their own story, but, as dramatists, they haven’t stepped outside of themselves to scratch beyond on the surface of their material.
They remember, learn, think, but never reflect or critically engage, eroding the play’s potential stakes along the way to its cliff-hanger ending.
Staging
Produced by Nautanki Bazaar in association with Factory Theatre, the play is presented at the Studio Theatre, which has risers on two sides of the room with the stage in the centre. Oftentimes the couple would address one side of the audience before making their way to the other side.
For the most part, this was not an issue, but, towards the end, Rodrigeuz’s decision to stage two critical scenes a certain way baffled me. The first, for their proposal on Juhu Beach, is staged against a wall, with the couple looking directly at each other, their faces obscured from all.
It happens again, when, in the final moments, after Neha receives an email and they sit side by side on a suitcase, their faces bathed in the blue light as they look at each other before looking ahead towards the future of their fate. Since their backs were facing me, I could not see them or feel its impact, meaning that this critical moment where the performer’s countenance communicated a complex confluence of uncertainty and hope, could unfortunately not be received by half the audience.
For the proposal, if they rotated in circles, both sides of the coin spun would be visible. In the final scene, if their backs were against the wall, or they weren’t facing each other, the perspective would be democratic and that poignant note could’ve been beneficially achieved in all of us.
This obstruction left me unable to appreciate the dedication poured into that earned moment.
Final Thoughts
Like the application adviser tells Himanshu about filling the forms, “It’s not what you put, it’s how you put it.”
In a sense, there were, and are, other ways this play could’ve been better put.
By Nirris Nagendrarajah for Ludwig-Van.
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