Broken
Images,
a one-woman play, ran a single night at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center
yesterday, attracting a full house, despite its middle of the week showing.
Dubbed a
psychological thriller, it’s the story of an Indian author who writes short
stories in Hindi but doesn’t achieve widespread fame until she publishes her
first novel in English, leaving her to deal with issues of identity and guilt.
The story is about so much more—not just language, but various layers of
identity, awareness, interpretation, perception, perspective, love, and
betrayal. There were also messages about the alienation we feel from ubiquitous
technology and media and a modern take on an age-old folklore. And while those
themes may sound overdone, the play felt fresh and powerful.
A few things
about this show caught my attention from the get-go. Not only the rave reviews,
but the high-caliber names associated with the play. One of India’s premier
actresses, Shabana Azmi, plays the title role, as the author who banters almost
exclusively in English with what appears to be her alter ego—common sense,
conscience, or maybe devil’s advocate—shown on a large, plasma-screen monitor.
Azmi has always been on the cutting edge. One of her most stunning and gutsy
roles came in 1996, when already a well-regarded celebrity, Azmi played a
lesbian in Deepa Mehta’s landmark film, Fire, a role that included a
love scene.
In Broken
Images, she spends an hour alone on stage, holding the audience spellbound
with her incredible stage presence combined with a powerful script written by
one of India’s leading playwrights, Girish Karnad (also a noted director and
actor). The performance was directed by renowned theatre actor and producer
Alyque Padamsee, who’s also known for his supporting role as Pakistan’s
founding father in the film Gandhi.
The story of Broken Images starts with the author, Manjula
Sharma, giving a short presentation introducing the movie version of her
now-bestselling book. In the talk, she explains how she's been criticized for
writing it in English instead of her native language, why she chose that
language (because, she explains, that's how it came to her), and how much her
family supported her through its writing. At the end of her presentation, she
prepares to leave the set but her image on the monitor televising her
presentation keeps talking. Only this time, her image on screen is addressing
herself on the stage. The audience doesn't know exactly who the character on
the screen is supposed to represent—Manjula’s inner self or her outer one, her
conscience or her ego—but regardless, the TV Manjula begins probing her
on-stage self about the same issues she’d discussed in the presentation, slowly
unraveling the real story of how and why the book came about and the role her
family played in it.
It's just
one actor whose splintered character interacts with herself on screen and
on set, using well-coordinated dialogue and body language. There's no other set
change, no costume change, and few props other than that large monitor. Nothing
really happens in the physical sense. And yet the audience knows something
important, something big is happening on stage. The storyline moves quickly,
changing and twisting, making you think a lot and feel a lot. I hadn't realized
I was holding my breath through most of it until the end when I finally
exhaled.
The complex
layers of the language and identity themes in Broken Images are
fascinating. The character discusses the criticism she receives as an author
writing in a colonial language, yet the title of the play comes from the
English poem, The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot: “….for you know only/A heap
of broken images, where the sun beats,/And the dead tree gives no shelter….”
Playwright Girish Karnad wrote the original script as the protagonist having
written her earlier stories in her native South Indian language, Kannada. Somewhere along the way,
Karnad adapted the show to larger audiences, changing his character from a
Kannada author to a Hindi one. And while the play has been performed in
Kannada, Hindi, and now in English, Karnad himself, it’s worth noting, is
Konkani. So the duality of languages and identity layers the real-life drama of
the performance as well.
Director
Padamsee somewhat addresses these ironies on the play’s official site (http://www.brokenimagesplay.com): “We
live today in a double world. Who we project ourselves to be … and who we
really are…. In our discussions at rehearsals, we found out more about
ourselves than the characters in Girish’s play. Broken [i]mages sometimes
re-create themselves in new and unexpected avatars.”
It’s
incredible how much punch could be packed into a one-woman, 60-minute show, but
by the end, the flawless acting and script transcend what you think a play can
do.
This sounds like an amazing show, Supriya. So lucky you got a chance to see it!
ReplyDeleteIts a beautiful expression of crisis of identity as well as the author's dilemma.
ReplyDeletesuch a inspirational work
ReplyDelete