Stir Q&A: Srutika Sabu embodies a South Asian uncle in drag-king clown show at the rEvolver Festival
1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go touches on the model minority myth with hilarity and heart
Srutika Sabu in 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go.
Upintheair Theatre presents 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go at The Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab on May 30 at 7:30 pm and May 31 at 8:40 pm, as part of the rEvolver Festival
SPICY HOT-SAUCE TORTURE and an anime boss fight are just a couple of the antics that Srutika Sabu gets up to as Santosh Santosh.
The character—part drag king, part clown—is the star of the Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist’s solo show 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go, which is premiering in Vancouver at this year’s rEvolver Festival. As a software engineer and second-hand Tesla owner, Santosh is living a good life. The only thing that seems to be missing, as his immigrant parents point out, is love.
Directed by Ken Hall and narrated by Mahdi Mozafari (both of whom played a hand in devising it as well), 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go tells the story of one South Asian man learning to find his groove. It was a fan favourite at last year’s Toronto Fringe Festival and this year’s Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival. Though it’s rife with physical comedy, the show also touches on identity and migration in thoughtful ways.
Stir caught up with Sabu before the rEvolver Festival to learn a bit more about Tosh, and how her own life experiences informed his personality.
What drove you to make the transition from medical school to theatre? Can you tell us a bit about how you became steeped in the world of clowning, and what appeals to you most about it?
In 2019, I graduated med school in America, had an existential crisis, moved to Toronto, and then became a late-bloomer theatre kid. Around 2022, I was helping my sister elope in Vancouver and she suggested I do something to make more friends in Toronto. A month later, I signed up for an improv class and this opened me up to the world of Toronto theatre.
A year later, I took my first clown class at Sweet Action Theatre. I wasn’t great at it, but something told me to keep taking classes and doing it. A year after that, I got a Toronto Fringe spot and made a clown show with some friends and my clown mentor Ken Hall. The show’s name was 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go—and a year later, it’s making its Vancouver debut.
The appeal of clown is that it’s a performance and storytelling philosophy that centres vulnerability and presence and uses the audience as a scene partner. I am always amazed at how clown—with just eye contact and letting the audience in—can transport the audience to new worlds. I also love that clown is about failing and taking bold risks. I think clown creates some of the most exciting theatre I’ve seen.
Srutika Sabu. Photo by Eden Graham
How did the character of Tosh come into existence? How would you describe his personality, and what would you say is the most enjoyable aspect of getting to portray him onstage?
Tosh was born after less than a year of taking clown in a Deanna Fleysher drag-king clown class. (If you ever get a chance to take it, do it!) I was encouraged to take this two-day workshop at Sweet Action. I had never done drag before, but the class guides you through making a drag character. Unexpectedly, I ended up winning an elimination-style class show with my character Santosh Santosh.
Santosh is a mix of South Asian software engineer and brown uncle. He’s a tech worker, thought leader, and second-hand Tesla owner. He’s the drunk uncle at a South Indian wedding. He’s always pitching business ideas. He’s reading the latest tech news with expired optimism. He sends you ridiculous WhatsApp good morning messages with baffling graphic design. He walks around with his hands behind his back carefully discerning the quality and price of mangos at the grocery store.
There’s a bit of me in there somewhere. Santosh, like myself, is a gen-1.5 Malayali-Canadian trying to impress parents who are traumatized by a point-based immigration system. He also shortens his name to Tosh, which is really a self-dig based on the fact that I shorten my hard-to-pronounce Indian name to Tika.
How would you describe Tosh’s relationship with his parents in this show? Are you drawing on any of your own life experiences to inform the plot in that regard?
Tosh is the overlooked, less successful middle child trying to do the Sisyphean task of trying to catch up to his more successful siblings. He loves his parents, they love him, but he can tell they don’t brag about him to their friends. His relationship to his parents is a central driving point in the show.
My parents, fortunately, are good parents and don’t pit their children against each other. My sister and I both have American medical degrees but my sister is a licensed physician, while I’m doing the artist thing. In another life, I think I would have started the artist journey a lot sooner, had it not been for the fears and anxieties that my parents inherited from their migration experiences.
Leaving medicine to become a clown was not a spontaneous decision. I had to fight for it, battling their real fears and anxieties about my future while trying to figure out what I wanted to do. In many ways, Santosh is about that process of fighting to give yourself permission to live an authentic life.
How are you addressing the model minority myth in 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go, and how do clown and drag-king elements lay the groundwork for you to explore serious topics?
Tosh really tries to get the approval of his immigrant parents. He’s the overlooked middle child to two neurosurgeon sisters and notably the only non-doctor. His accomplishments are not just compared to those of his sisters but also of other Malayali kids in his parents’ friend circle.
Malayali parents often measure the success of their parenting according to the accomplishments of their children. The core wound behind all this is the model minority myth—being the good brown successful South Asian immigrants. The show touches on these ideas very explicitly. Santosh needs to find his groove because he needs to understand how to measure his self-worth outside of his parents’ yardstick.
Clown and drag allow you to be surreal and absurd in a performance-art sort of way. There’s a bit in the show where he creates a success board to visually keep track of how he’s doing compared to his sisters in a hilarious way. There’s a part where he fights his inner demon in an anime boss fight. Clown and drag make complex ideas much more accessible but without sacrificing depth—and you get to do it with joy and heart.
What has the reception been like for 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go so far, and what excites you most about bringing it to the rEvolver Festival? Do you have any future plans for Tosh?
It’s the first time the show will happen outside of Toronto, so it’s very exciting to bring it to a new city. Clown is such an audience-dependent form, so no two shows are truly the same.
I’m working on a new solo Tosh show through the Buddies in Bad Times Emerging Creators Unit, which will happen on June 10. You get to see Tosh and his second-hand Tesla; it’s a 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go prequel of sorts. There’s also a podcast and a 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go sequel in the works. 
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