After her son Elijah’s birth, Hannah is struck by the urge to sing him traditional Hebrew songs mixed with a smattering of Céline Dion. Both Hannah and Maev reveal their birthing war wounds before they agree that labour isn’t even the hard part. They wrestle with guilt and shame for having ambitions beyond raising babies. Then one boozy summer in Stratford, they give each other a special kind of permission they both need.

Laura talks to playwright and performer Jiv Parasram, who is currently quarantining at home in Vancouver and getting ready to take a play online. Parasram reflects on being the first in his family to grow up in Nova Scotia, his complicated feelings about identity plays, and why he made the bold request for some audience members to skip part of the story.

Jiv is Canadian. Jiv is Indian. And Hindu. And West Indian. And Trinidadian too. Or maybe he is just colonized. In order to explore all these hyphenated identities, he creates the first-ever Hindu-Caribbean-Canadian identity play — even though he hates identity plays. He starts with a brief history of indentured servitude in Trinidad, and his family.

Jiv is the first in his family to be born in Canada and raised in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Here some people call him black, while his own family calls him “white boy”. Jiv goes on a teenage quest to Trinidad to untangle his roots and become more legitimately “third world”. Things do not go as planned.

Jiv shapeshifts again to prove identity is pretty trippy. Maybe we are all “Jiv”. Maybe this is all an illusion. But then a memory from Junior High brings him crashing back down to earth. Disaster strikes on 9/11 and Jiv feels forced to choose an “identity raft”. He’s not proud of his choice. He asks certain “Jivs” to skip to the next episode.

We all meet again for one final thought from our multi-hyphenated hero. Here’s why it matters how we choose to define the divides between us, and within us.

Chris talks to Governor General Award-winning playwright David Yee, who is currently isolating from home and workshopping a new play over Zoom. Yee reflects on why “underused” actors of colour often resort to writing their own stories, and why he wanted “Carried away on the crest of a wave” to be too big for small theatres. He also shares where he was when he first heard about the devastating 2004 Tsunami, and why he felt compelled to write an anthological play about “the lives that it touched, brought together and destroyed."

In 2004, the deadliest tsunami in recorded history tore through over a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean. In a series of vignettes, David Yee imagines the people left behind in disaster’s wake. In Australia, a scientist notes that the planet got smaller the day of the disaster. In Malaysia, two brothers toss family treasures to save their house from descending into the sea. In India, a priest tries to prove that his parishioners were saved by divine intervention.

The tragedy travels all the way to Toronto where a radio DJ defies his bosses to perform a parody of Tears for Fears. In Sri Lanka, a man speaks frankly to a child orphaned by the tsunami. And in Thailand, a man mourns his beloved wife in the company of an highly-specialized escort.

The ripples extend far below the surface of the earth as two men endlessly fall down a hole. In Salt Lake City, an FBI agent questions a bereaved mother about the child she lost in the tsunami. And on a sandy beach in Ko Phi Phi Island, Thailand, two men sit together deciding who is responsible for the tragedy.