REVIEW★★★★: The Surrogate: Crow’s Theatre (Studio Theatre), Toronto 🇨🇦

By Hamza Jahanzeb | 5 March 2026 | Photo credit: Kendra Epik Photography

TORONTO — ‘Everyone who comes through those doors gets the best care we can give’ is what the audience hears from nurse Christina (Antonette Rudder) when Sameer enters a hospital hurriedly and with great anxiety after his surrogate suffers a medical emergency. Except in the opening scene of Mohsin Zaidi’s The Surrogate we’re in the USA—where socialised medicine, as is the case in Canada and the UK, simply does not exist —specifically, the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s not explained why initially, but a pregnant surrogate Marya (Sarena Parmar) suffers a seizure in the Southern US state, miles away from the liberal metropolis of New York City where Canadian Sameer (Fuad Ahmed) and his husband Jake (Thom Nyhuus) ordinarily reside.

It’s a drama that hits the ground running. Quite literally, at that. The play opens with Sameer cutting a call to Jake by claiming it’s ‘work’—when in fact it’s his mother calling. As someone from the South Asian diaspora, this drama immediately hooked me in; those from a global majority background living in the ‘West’ tend to lead quite the double lives. What ensues is a return call to his dear ‘mummy-ji’—who has been tracking his location via Apple’s “Find My Friends” function—demanding to know why he’s in the Deep South. That underlying insistence that mothers must look out for their sons is also all too familiar. Being a South Asian male, often the apple of their mother’s eye, the burden placed on the “man” is something Zaidi captures with painful precision. It also is quite stark to note that this area is perceived to be more hostile to people of colour, too. In the heterosexual equivalent of this overprotective bubble-wrapping, these men are often devoid of any self-actualisation, transitioning straight from mummy’s boy to devoted husband—and Sameer embodies this tension completely. It is an instantly recognisable character, and one not often enough seen on the stage. I also really enjoyed the costumes – by Andrew Broderick – which only further enhanced the teal colour-palette of the sterile hospital environment.

The Surrogate insists on nuance, and it delivers that aplenty during its 90-min production. Nuance, when writing the South Asian experience, is truly needed across the world—and that’s where Zaidi’s writing excels. His is a structure that is quick-paced from the off, a deliberate mirroring of Sameer’s almost pulverised and frenetic mind. The sitcom-esque exchanges with Nurse Christina (Antonette Rudder) allow the sparky dialogue to bring forth comedy chops (even if an over-reliance of suspending one’s disbelief is required), with Rudder’s timing nothing short of impeccable. One joke in particular—a brilliantly placed quip about a horse tranquilliser, very much in the register of recreational drug use that runs through queer life—drew one of the night’s biggest laughs and landed with the gusto required given the direction the play veers towards in the latter half. This light-hearted, at times gleefully silly opening allows the later drama to hit considerably harder, as the audience is taken through a gut-wrenching reckoning when the realities of this traumatic experience—carrying the lifelong dream of a gay couple—come to devastating fruition. Or at least, in Sameer’s mind. Audiences gasped as his douchebag status is fully confirmed by the penultimate scene where the possibility of the child being born with issues comes to the viewfinder. Christopher Manousos’s direction in this piece brings a modern family’s complexities into sharp relief, placing the cast at the intersection of sexuality, religion, race, and privilege. His staging gives the actors the room to let their moral compasses collide with the legal realities that queer couples face in real time, and the result is a production that never feels didactic but consistently feels urgent. The pacing is one of the production’s great strengths: the breakneck opening mimics Sameer’s spiralling anxiety, before Manousos pulls back the throttle to allow the emotional weight of the second half to settle into the audience’s chest. And settle, it bloody well does!

Scott Penner’s mirrored set design is a sheer stroke of genius—giving the audience a fractured, kaleidoscopic image of the woman who has offered her womb in an act of urgency so that two men might have what passes for an ‘ordinary’ life. Chris Malkowski’s lighting extends this metaphor beautifully: cold, clinical beams reminiscent of a hospital ward speak to the transactional nature of the arrangement and the artificiality that occasionally intrudes on Sameer and Jake’s relationship. And yet, one sequence bathes the stage in a deep, saturated red as the two men come together in a bathroom to embrace—their queer bodies contorted, desperate, alive—and it is genuinely electrifying. That kind of unashamed, physical queer representation is too rarely seen on stage, and it amplified both the flaws in their relationship (one being the open relationship woes) and their shared desperation to appear united as their dream of family inches nearer to a lived reality. Maddie Bautista’s sound design completes the world: a soundscape that matches the emotional temperature of each scene, moving from the tightly coiled to the wide open with impressive precision.

Fuad Ahmed is quite the revelation as Sameer. He brings Zaidi’s protagonist to life with an authenticity that is hard to fake—you believe every escalation, every retreat, every moment of a man trying to keep his plates spinning while the whole enterprise threatens to collapse. Thom Nyhuus also brings a sheer pragmatist warmth to his Jake, who offers some utter corkers of a line as well as an emotional scene with his surrogate in which he confides in her; his is the performance that draws the audience in the most when the drama risks overwhelming, offering moments of genuine levity and humanity that prevent Sameer’s story from caving in on itself. The audible gasps from the press night audience at several points in the play were testament to how completely the house had surrendered to these two men. It also made me feel, as a queer person, how we are so desperately in need of more stories as we live such parallel lives to our hetero-normative neighbours.

Sarena Parmar, as Marya, is the glue that holds the storyline of together despite being its most legally and emotionally precarious figure. She navigates the ruptures in Marya’s relationship with the two men with exceptional subtlety, and her presence anchors the play’s second half in a way that commands quiet attention despite her own dilemma about whether or not to keep the baby. The legal dimensions of her position—as the biological mother of a child she has agreed to surrender as per the agreement—and what that may well mean for the next eighteen years of her life, are among the play’s most provocative threads, and Parmar holds all of it with grace despite a few issues with the pronunciation of ‘Inshallah’ and ‘Qasim’ (which a voice dialect coach like the brilliant Gurkiran Kaur from the UK could have easily remedied). Siddharth Sharma’s Qasim does eventually arrive in the second half, and while I would have welcomed more of him—more conversation, more of the inner life that might have deepened his character’s pathos—Sharma makes his presence felt with precision of a son in this meaningful role.

‘This is a woman who is giving herself and possibly not getting anything back.’ It is Antonette Rudder’s Christina, however, who delivers the production’s most unforgettable passages. Positioned as a moralistic interrogator—almost barrister-like in making a case for Marya’s (a fellow woman’s) humanity. Rudder’s monologue on what it means for a woman to give herself entirely, with no guaranteed return, reduced a significant portion of the press night audience to tears. I was among them. Her delivery was astute, convincing, and genuinely devastating. I had not thought about any of these questions walking in. By the time she was done (and in the subsequent days), I couldn’t stop thinking about them: how far any couple—straight or queer—will go in order to assimilate into the idea of ‘family’; what it costs the people on the margins of that dream; and who, ultimately, pays the highest price.

The Surrogate is a world premiere that announces Mohsin Zaidi as a significant new voice in playwriting. Hot on the heels of his celebrated memoir A Dutiful Boy, Zaidi has written something that is as intimate as it is explosive—a play which sits inside complexity, rumination and allows the audiences to leave without having to rush to form a conclusion. In a cultural and political moment when stories about queerness, South Asian identity, bodily autonomy, and belonging are too often reduced to talking points, this is theatre that insists on the full, contradictory, painful humanity of what its protagonists go through.

The Surrogate – Listing details:

Written by Mohsin Zaidi
Directed by Christopher Manousos
Set Design: Scott Penner
Lighting Design: Chris Malkowski
Sound Design: Maddie Bautista
Costume Design: Andrew Broderick
📍: Crow’s Theatre, Toronto, ON🇨🇦 (Until 29 March 2026)
🕰️: Running Time: 95 minutes, no interval)
🎟️: https://www.crowstheatre.com/shows-events/the-surrogate