Review: They Call Me Q

Qurrat Ann Kadwani’s one-woman turn in They Call Me Q is nothing if not personal. The story is the woman’s own. It is confessional (but not graphic); it is honest (but not squirm-inducing). The thrust of it brings to mind Carson McCullers’ Frankie, endlessly wrestling with her elusive identity — or it does if Frankie is imagined as a young Indian woman growing up in the Bronx. Kadwani’s “we of me” is the assortment of people in her life who have shaped her varying notions of herself, and you listen and watch, and you quite strangely develop a sense of yourself as an Indian girl with fiercely Indian parents tugging on one arm and the youthful extremes, or extremes of Bronx youth, alternately pulling on the other or slugging you in the kisser. This is something, for those of us non-Indian and non-Bronx.