Colonial Circus: History, Clown Style at Orlando Fringe Credit: Courtesy Photo

White imperialists may have spread themselves across the globe like mayonnaise, but Brown folks finally get the last laugh in Colonial Circus, a brilliantly bizarre blitz through history that blends skillful absurdist slapstick with savage sociological satire.

Storytellers Shreya Parashar and Sachin Sharma hail from India by way of Toronto, and their ridiculous recapitulation of how Britain raped their homeland by displacing indigenous deities with Jesus is equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking.

From their endearingly off-key opening ritual to a musical finale filleting performative allyship, these cunning clowns employ minimalist wordplay and masterful whiteface mugging to slaughter sacred cows with glee, extracting riotous laughter (and natural resources) from their audiences with patronizing apologies.

Since this piece made its award-winning debut at Orlando Fringe’s FestN4 last year, Parashar and Sharma have polished it even further, tightening up the pacing and punching up some of the punchlines. Colonial Circus is not for fragile folks, nor is it technically a circus in any conventional sense; but it is a laugh-riot reminder that playful perversity and pointed politics are not mutually exclusive, but rather a potent combination.

Two2Mango (Toronto, ON, Canada)
Pink Venue, Lowndes Shakespeare Center
60 minutes; 18 and up
Tickets: $15

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This article appears in Orlando Fringe 2026.