
Portland is rich with theaters adept at new work — and no company does new work better than Profile Theatre, which steadily serves up thoughtfully curated offerings from some of the most compelling playwrights working in theater today. As part of its current focus on the work of celebrated playwright Lauren Yee, Profile has mounted a particularly rich production continuing through Feb. 9 of one of her earlier works, Samsara, first produced in 2015. Its short run in Portland is not to be missed.
The concept of samsara in Hindu thought captures the idea of the endless cycle of births, deaths, and rebirths in which all beings participate. This play is very specifically about wanting a baby, creating a baby, and being a parent to a baby — including ways the adults involved mean to wrest control of an experience that is much too big for that. As one might expect from Yee, the play approaches that subject playfully, comedically — and as it loosens you up with humor, the play shifts and moves you beyond what you thought you would see. It experiments with time and space and literal reality, unsettling you to illuminate deeper, also real connections that you weren’t expecting — perhaps because they were in your blind spot.
The story at first feels conventional and broadly comic. Katie and Craig are a white American couple who want to be parents. Despite their buoyant best efforts, they are unable to conceive. They settle on surrogacy and, though they are relatively privileged, their resources are not unlimited. They decide to hire a surrogate in India because it is the more economical of their options — though as with most things, it is more like Katie decides and Craig decides he wants what Katie wants.
As in real life, though not exactly, things get complicated. There is travel involved, though Katie won’t fly and Craig doesn’t like traveling. There is obviously more to say about that, but neither is fully saying it; one senses that they have kept their world small enough to feel manageable. And though they adopt the advertising line that surrogacy is “100% safe, 100% natural” (as though any route to parenting could fit that description), a transaction where everyone gets what they want, it feels more tenuous than that.
For one thing, it seems to matter more than either of them thought it would that the fetus resides in the womb of an Indian woman in India. Both Katie and Craig keep imagining a baby that doesn’t look like them, even though the surrogate’s biological material isn’t involved in that way. In unguarded moments, Craig’s doubts spill out about the surrogate and his judgment of her motivations. He makes the trip to India for the birth without Katie, though she insists on frequent contact that appears aimed at reassuring her that she is still involved. Resentments and doubts and small fissures surface.

Meanwhile, 18-year-old Suraiya — the surrogate they have hired in India — has her own agenda, viewing the pregnancy as a means to her aim of becoming a physician. She isn’t interested in being a parent, and views herself as only tangentially involved. But her feelings, too, are more complicated. Though she believes herself to be disinterested, the fetus has a few things to say about that. Their physical bond is also a psychic one; she imagines him as brown like all the babies she has seen and, though she sees herself as merely a holding tank, a “microwave,” the fetus knows better. As he puts it in exchanges we witness, “You’re my lungs, you’re my blood. How can I not be a part of you?”
The primary players — mother, father, surrogate mother (so-called), and fetus — are unsettled and, as the play unfolds, Yee means us to be, too. The play is filled with physical comedy, and unexpected turns, some of them a little weird. But all of its turns are meant to open you to questions quite under-explored. This purportedly safe and natural transaction is neither — and strangely, it contains patterns of colonial engagement that we collectively treat as in the past, if we think about them at all.
Exploitation explained away and justified is reborn, part of an ongoing and unexamined cycle that exists in denial of the connections involved. Among other things, Suraiya gets only a small portion of the amount that Craig and Katie paid, which was set at a level that capitalizes on the intensity of their wish to have the rare thing that they haven’t been able to acquire in their otherwise comfortable lives up to now. Where does the rest of that money go? Whose interests drive this bargain, and why?
This is not a polemical play — that’s not in Yee’s design, and it’s not how that design is realized in this playful yet tender production. Katie and Craig are not just archetypes, though they do reveal aspects of unconscious exploitation that we Americans don’t intend to notice ourselves enacting. Suraiya is complicated, pragmatically reaching for the agency afforded to her. The play is compassionate toward their longings and misgivings and the holes in the perspectives of each, including the self-doubt of two women who exist in uneasy relationship to motherhood, as so many of us do. The problems here are collective, and somehow are presented incisively yet without blame.
This production is co-directed by Jamie Rea and Ajai Tripathi, and Subashini Ganesan-Forbess served as a cultural consultant. Their care shows, opening windows into insight for any who want to partake of the offering. And the members of this nimble cast hold the story well: Jerilyn Armstrong makes us care about Katie despite her sharp edges, Benjamin Tissell balances Craig’s wobbly but good intentions, Veda Baldota gives us a worldly Suraiya who overestimates what she knows, and Abrar Hague carries well what is perhaps the most challenging work, investing us in the imagined connection between Suraiya and the fetus she carries. Jonathan Cullen rounds out the cast in a variety of roles, most prominently a Frenchman who occupies Katie’s dreams and muddled notions of identity.
Together, they and the other artists who collaborated to bring us this production are offering us an occasion for both fun and mindfulness. You may well leave with questions and insights into cycles in which we have all been participating, likely without registering the costs and connections involved. It’s a gift crafted to seep into your consciousness in the best and most complicated ways.
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Profile Theatre’s “Samsara” continues through Feb. 9 at Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 S.W. Morrison St., Portland. See ticket and schedule information here.
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