Zaiba Baig returns to the stage with a pair of – sort of – trans rage plays

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• Title: Kainchee Lagaa and Jhooti
• Written by: Zaiba Baig
• Performed by: Praneet Akilla, Zaiba Baig, Angel Glady, Xina
• Director: Tawiah Ben M’Carthy
• Company: Buddies in Bad Times and House of Beida
• Venue: Buddies in Bad Times
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs until April 18

In her CBC sitcom Sort Of, writer-actor Zaiba Baig introduced Canadian audiences to Sabi, a nonbinary nanny who over the course of three seasons navigated different types of transition. The show won a Peabody Award and was itself a symbol of transition for this country’s television landscape, offering a precedent for more inclusive, less formulaic TV about queer millennials and their stories.

In The Begging Brown Bitch Plays – that title alone suggests an angrier, more angular Baig than audiences might recall from Sort Of – the playwright digs under the skin of what it means to exist in a trans, brown body, and especially one that in the last five years has become a national symbol for queer joy.

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But trans existence, argues Baig, isn’t always joyful, or redemptive, or even pleasant. Trans stories ought to be messy, she explains in Jhooti, the second (and stronger) of the two plays presented under the Begging Brown Bitch umbrella. Trans narratives have every right to be as indulgent, lugubrious and ugly as any other subsect of stories, she argues. Baig doesn’t care if The Begging Brown Bitch Plays shatter audiences’ CBC-sanitized perception of her – she’s earned the right to sharp edges and unbroadcastable snark. The “nice girl” in her, she recently told Toronto Life, has died.

Kainchee Lagaa opens the diptych with a provocative odyssey: Arsalan, played by Praneet Akilla, is on the way to reconnect with his sister (Angel Glady). Their relationship, thorny and illicit, shapeshifts over the course of the 80-minute play, which frequently comments on the chasm between poverty and the tourists who gawk at it.

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Tawiah Ben M’Carthy directs an unflinching production that leans into the taboos of Baig’s script: Kainchee Lagaa is a play about incest, and the toxicity of self-fulfillment, with deep sexual knots the characters yearn to untie and retighten. Dramaturgically, it borrows some from the in-yer-face approach to playwriting – think Sarah Kane or Edward Bond – and the offers Baig makes are often compelling, echoing plays such as Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched.

Then again, M’Carthy’s uneven staging also obscures the play so much that it takes a frustrating amount of time for its themes to fully bloom. Rachel Forbes’s set sees audiences occupy two perpendicular walls of Buddies in Bad Times’ largest performance venue, meaning the actors primarily play to an uninhabited corner. Gauzy curtains on either side of the playing space further muddy what’s happening – depending on where you sit, you might not bear witness to any of the play’s most gripping action until its dénouement.

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Jhooti, a solo performance for Baig, isn’t any less frustrating. After a brief intermission, in which most of Kainchee Lagaa’s set is stripped away, Baig takes the stage in a tornado of mixed metaphors and fury. As Sakeena, she expresses the character’s greatest fear – being chopped up – before revealing, no, that’s the thing she wants most out of her romantic encounters with men. For about 80 per cent of Jhooti, the play feels overlong and tedious, an exercise in patience as Baig exorcises the polite, understated whimsy of Sort Of from her very soul.

But then something shifts. After performing most of Jhooti with a South Asian accent, she drops the affectation entirely, and addresses the audience with a playful smirk: She’s tired of doing this, she says. She’s tired of pretending. She’s tired of serving as a vessel for others’ stories and neuroses. Sakeena’s not her name – “You know that,” she says, riffing on the piece’s continuing metanarrative about Baig’s CBC fame – and she’s sick of not being believed.

Jhooti’s conclusion is among the most electric I’ve seen in a live theatre; it’s also among the most spoilable. It’s a final image that epitomizes the best of what live theatre can do, and for a fleeting second, it even makes the theatre seem dangerous – as if we might not escape without Baig’s express permission.

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Which leaves The Begging Brown Bitch Plays in a strange spot: They’re not particularly enjoyable, and I’m not sure I’d recommend them to anyone without the endurance to sit through close to three hours of uneven theatre. Three hours of theatre that, by and large, don’t pay off until Baig’s final monologue.

But the duo of plays offers audiences a new side of Baig, a caustic, de-CBC’d portrait of the artist whose relationship with race and gender is far more complicated than some might have gleaned from Sort Of. What’s most important about these plays is that they’re being produced – that they offer Baig an opportunity to complexify her own legacy as an artist, away from the shadow of this country’s national broadcaster.

Whether or not the plays are actually pleasurable to watch is sort of – badum, tss – beside the point.