Desi Today Magazine
It is universally believed that men process emotions differently than women. While most women tend to recognize and express how they are feeling, when it comes to men, society has set different expectations from this gender. It is socially acceptable for women to express their feelings, like sadness, fear or tears. But men are not encouraged to outwardly express their emotions. From an early age, men are conditioned to believe that expressing their feelings is out of character with the male identity. Doing so can ruin their image of being strong and stoic.
Specifically, men are told that crying in front of other people will threaten their masculinity.
These cultural norms and gender stereotypes have been circulating for generations, and they can be toxic, especially for males. Men who express their emotions are often seen as weak. Because of that, many men neglect to show their emotions because they’re afraid of the repercussions.
While there are many people actively dismantling traditional notions of masculinity to build a more inclusive and empathetic society for all genders, heteronormative expectations of how a man should look, act and feel are still pervasive in our culture today, explains Zee Zee Theatre’s Artistic and Executive Director Cameron Mackenzie who has recently directed play Men Express Their Feelings.
Zee Zee Theatre recently presented the Vancouver premiere of this play in March. Written by Canadian playwright Sunny Drake, the poignant and provocative comedy challenges all these stereotypical assumptions about masculinity, gender norms, sexuality, and identity.
This brilliantly funny and meaningful comedy, written by Canada’s celebrated trans male playwrights, offers Vancouver audiences an essential perspective on masculinity that embraces and empowers vulnerability and transparency and ultimately redefines what it means to be a man.
Following its premiere in March 2020, Men Express Their Feelings was hailed by the Calgary Herald as “an instant Canadian classic,” lauded for its patriotic nod to Canada’s favorite pastime and “wildly, unabashedly funny” script.
Set in the locker room of a community hockey rink, two teen hockey players and their dads are forced by the minor hockey league chair to work through their feelings following a heated scuffle between the dads in the parking lot. As tempers flare and secrets are revealed, the foursome tackle difficult conversations, addressing complex topics of racial and cultural tension, sexual attraction, and generational divides with wit and levity.
Structured like a hockey game, the work has three distinct periods and instant replays that depict moments from different characters’ viewpoints, inviting audiences to witness their transformation as they move beyond physical aggression to explore the deeper meaning of their emotions.
Men Express Their Feelings stars Quinn Churchill and Ishan Sandhu as 17-year-old hockey players with Jeff Gladstone and Munish Sharma as their dueling fathers. Ishan, who is one of the main characters of the play in an interview with Desi Today talks about his role and how the play challenges stereotypes.
Ishan moved to Canada in 2015 to pursue higher education. Describing himself as “first-generation actor and writer based in Vancouver,” for whom acting was a passion and hobby but never something he thought as a career option. And that all changed during his second year at UBC when he took stage acting class as an elective. “I spent most of the term being obsessed with that class, saw many plays, analyzed scripts and gained an appreciation of the art at the deeper level,” he says.
He knew it was for him then and landed on the opportunity to work in this play. In Men Express their Feelings, Ishan is playing the character of Raj Sharma, a 17-year-old Indo-Canadian high school hockey player who is “complex, beautiful, funny, very stupid, scared and very very sarcastic.”
He is someone who is trying to identify in this world and at the same time trying not to be defined. “As a closeted pansexual brown hockey player, he doesn’t belong on the ice. His people don’t belong on the ice, his sexuality doesn’t belong on the ice but deep down he knows there is no one else who belongs to the ice more than him,” Ishan explains.
Characters like Raj exist around us who want to express what they feel, however socially defined parameters of masculinity come in the way. Therefore, a need for such plays becomes important. “Masculinity for me as a word has a negative connotation attached to it. Having grown up hearing ‘men don’t cry’ or ‘Be a man and do it’ has made the essence of masculinity an emotionally unavailable, unaffected bravado that men must mask themselves with. It is this mask that needs to be removed so that we can see what truly lies behind it and redefine what it is to identify as a man. Because I can tell you one thing masculinity is soft, tender, hot anger, and a whole lot more than what we believe.”
And when it comes to South Asian males, the perspective on masculinity becomes more flawed because of the stigma attached to mental health. The lack of expression of feelings can lead to mental health problems. But Ishan rightly says, “There is a bigger stigma associated with mental illness and therapy in South Asian households – something that we all know but don’t acknowledge.”
According to him, it is time we all stop categorizing masculinity under one umbrella, celebrate it for the million different things, and support “each other when we express ourselves.”
