Dance Like A Man—A Theatre Review

By Supriya Savkoor
 

Lillette Dubey and Vijay Crishna

Even in the bustling international milieu of the Washington, D.C. metro area, Indian plays in English are a rarity, and maybe that’s part of the appeal, but I love Indian English theatre. So lucky me when Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like A Man recently came to the Maryland suburbs (which, on a side note, is a surprising hub of great indie theatre).

One of the main draws for me was that the play was both acted and directed by the amazing Lillette Dubey, whose brilliant film performance you may have seen when she played the mother of the bride in the celebrated indie gem, Monsoon Wedding. (Another fun fact: Dubey at the time was roughly the same age as the actress who played her daughter, making her smooth, graceful performance all the more astounding).

Like the best of Indian plays in English, Dance Like A Man too is character driven, peeling back layer after interesting layer about not only its characters but about, among other things, gender roles, choices (including the lack thereof), and one’s place in the world.

The story begins when Lata (played by Suchitra Pillai) brings her unassuming  fiancé (played by Joy Sengupta), home to meet her parents, who live in the home of Lata’s late grandfather, who was a much-admired freedom fighter, helping free India of its colonial shackles. Lata, like her parents (played by Dubey and Vijay Crishna), is a classical dancer, in the style of Bharat Natyam.


Suchitra Pillai and Joy Sengupta

That’s the backdrop. The story, however, is told in brilliant, suspenseful flashes between the present, in which the newly engaged and obviously ambitious Lata is on the brink of establishing her career, and the past, in which the parents were building their own careers and their marriage.

The play was dubbed in the local market as a comedy but, while it has many moments of humor (particularly as the new fiancé figures out how to navigate through the quirks of his betrothed and her parents), it’s full of ever-heightening tension and suspense as the characters explore where they’ve come from, where they’re going, and where their true loyalties and devotions lie. Indeed, it’s brilliance hails in part because of the outstanding performances of the four actors who take two acts and 90 minutes to pull you through half a century in the life of one family and their countless challenges, mostly self inflicted.

If you get a chance, you must see this play, and chances are good, you’ll have an opportunity at a theatre near you. The actors have given more than 400 performances of this play that has traveled around the world countless times. You name it—Muscat, Amsterdam, New York, Brussels, Kuala Lampur, Singapore, Auckland—the play has been there and is most likely coming back. The New York Times puts it best: “Seeing acting of this quality is transforming ... and even if the play becomes disturbing at times .....joyful!”

Off The Beaten Track: A Traveling Theatre... Site?

We all have heard of traveling theatres, but how about a traveling theatre site? Our guest this week is Karen Tortora-Lee, the managing Director, editor-in-chief, and founder of TheHappiestMedium.com, who tells the story of how she’s taken her New York theatre review publication on the road. As a reviewer, she has covered everything from the Fringe Festival to the First Irish Festival, from the New York Musical Festival to the Midtown International Festival, and even the Fight Festival in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. She currently serves as vice chair of the board of directors for Maieutic Theatre Works.

 

When I started TheHappiestMedium.com in 2009, I had a very clear goal in mind – I wanted to highlight, showcase, and celebrate the amazingly talented people I came in contact with every day. I wanted The Happiest Medium to be the virtual Elaine's – a place where people could stop in for a while and see some regulars, or see some new faces, but always feel that they were welcomed ... and always know they were in an environment that was safe, inclusive, and fun. 

From the feedback we've consistently gotten so far, I have to say – we've definitely created some sort of je ne sais quoi that people don't get from other sites. Maybe it's the little stars in the background. Okay, okay – maybe it's really that we have some of the best dang contributors around (Antonio Minino, Dianna Martin, Geoffrey Paddy Johnson, Stephen Tortora-Lee, and Lina Zeldovich as well as fabulous guest writers) who write with heart, style, flair – and pull no punches. These writers know their stuff.

After our first (very successful) year, a lot of people have asked me where we intend to take the site. After all, no one ever stays where they are, right? There's always another hill to climb, another high score to beat. Since we cover so much of the Off-Off-Broadway scene people think the natural path is to move on to Off-Broadway, then Broadway.

First of all, we do cover Off-Broadway occasionally – and I've had the opportunity to review some Broadway shows as well. I'm grateful, but really . . . it's not all it's cracked up to be. If I want to continue the initial goal of THM then covering and re-covering the same small group of shows on Broadway that everyone else is covering doesn't seem that appealing to me. I mean, face it – does the world need another reporting of what happened at the Spider Man musical last night?

So our second year at THM is all about making a reality of what I like to call Operation: Off The Grid – as in off the grid of Manhattan. Yes, it's scary. But hear me out: I had the opportunity to review a show in New Jersey last October, and it blew me away. Now come on – I'm not naive. I don't believe that the only talent you'll find is in NYC. But I just didn't expect a small theatre in New Jersey to be so lush, layered, and fantastic.

Since I believe my calling is to amplify the audience's experience, I wanted to tell the world! AND I wanted to see what else is out there. Theatres in Maine, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Massachusetts, Cleveland! So we're taking THM on the road. Just like Man vs. Food seeks out those amazing gastronomical gems hidden away in every city, we want to find those small regional theaters that are blowing away their local audiences season after season – and make a connection with them.

Our goal is to eventually have a network of theatres all across America that are being reviewed by local reviewers and are checking in with us. A national chain of Happiest Mediums!  

Honestly, if you would have asked me in 2009 what I would have seen just one year later for THM, I never would have imagined we'd have come as far as we did in the first year. So now, I don't put limits on what to expect. The bigger your dream, the more likely you are to succeed, because honestly,  when you're dreaming up something HUGE for which there is no blueprint yet, there is no wrong way to get there. So gas up the car, set the GPS to the next playhouse, and save two seats on the aisle for me.

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THE HAPPIEST MEDIUM’s mission is to highlight, showcase and celebrate talent and creativity in all its forms and to write about it in a way that will ignite a spark for you too. THE HAPPIEST MEDIUM is a continuing media sponsor of The Planet Connections Festivities, and this year sponsored the FRIGID NEW YORK 2011 Festival. If you are a theater enthusiast and love the controversial and edgy off-Broadway productions, stop by TheHappiestMedium.com to see what’s currently playing and what’s a must-see.

Broken Images

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.