As promised, the first in two posts responding to Manjula Padmanabhan’s follow-up criticism of our production of her play Harvest at UC Berkeley. She labors under the misapprehension that we need her approval and benediction. This is absurd — everyone is entitled to their opinion, and if she didn’t like the performance then that’s fine. It is nice, of course, to have people like the work, but her backhanded praise (“the actors were very gifted; it isn’t their fault that they were encouraged to over-act recklessly”) and patronizing tone certainly don’t earn her points in my book.

I firmly believe in the prerogatives of the writer as long as they are willing to act on their objections. Unfortunately, Padmanabhan is unwilling to recognize the possibility that her play may be less than clear stylistically:

It is hard therefore, for me to understand the need for me to specify what I want from a production. I already know, from past experience, that some directors succeed in interpreting the script appropriately.

In other words, because someone else thinks the way she does, clearly everyone should reach that same “correct” conclusion. It’s a very appropriate attitude, given our contemporary political atmosphere in this country. Why start a dialogue when you have at least one supporter?

Now that she is safely validated by one production and three readings, she has eaten her cake. However, she says:

It’s not true that once a play has been written and published it is automatically “out there” for the world to do with it what it likes… So long as the playwright is still alive, it is considered quite normal for him/her to exercise some control over how the work is performed.

But she does not excercise this control. She has had problems with interpretations of her play before — does she merely go into every production offer, wide-eyed and full of naivete? No, her policy is “don’t ask, do tell.” She does not ask about the aims and aesthetics of the production, and she does tell people that the authorial intent, so clearly seen by at least one director, has been deliberately bypassed. Having eaten her cake in one production, Padmanabhan wants to have it as well.

Padmanbhan throws in a few platitudes that once she realizes that “a production that has set off down the wrong path” she still wouldn’t want “to object and to insist that it be done differently,” because “it’s kinder to permit the show to go on.” These are nice sentiments, but short of withdrawing her contract granting the rights to the production, there is little she can do in those situations. What undercuts this highmindedness is that after the first weekend she withdrew her permission to have the production videotaped, so I will never get to see my own performance in which I “over-act recklessly.”

I have already addressed the issue of her instructions within the text in my previous post. However, she believes the real problem to be that

some directors believe in allowing a play to breathe on its own, while others try to force their own breath into it. The first variety is wonderful to work with — and I have no difficulty accepting the minor cuts and/or additions such directors might request. The directors interpreted my script in a straightforward manner and didn’t add any unexpected flourishes to the existing text. The result was cool, austere and true to my intention; a happy place for all concerned to be in.

Padmanabhan writes of the director as an enabler, a technician who facilitates the embodiment of the text. This limited view of directing runs counter to the more modern (as modern as automobiles) idea of the director as a creative artist. She thinks of this as a difference of an “internal” intent that she has placed in the text versus and “external” intent imposed by the reader. But the play is in the end merely a collection of words, and the intent or interpretation she ascribes to it is her own “external” intent, validated by her authority as author. If she really wanted to be clear about her own intent, she could easily write some prefacing remarks about how the play should be performed exactly, following the script to the letter.

To her, this is completely unncessary, because some directors have produced the “cool, austere” production that she desires. Fundamentally, Padmanabhan believes that newer text should be privileged over older text:

I believe it’s because they don’t allow the text to breathe. When they’re performing familiar, classic plays, it doesn’t matter because the audience already knows what the original is like. The problem arises when they approach new work. In such situations, what they produce can appear to be what the playwright intended.

In her world, only those “classic” plays (what is classic?), the plots of which are universal or whose “original intent” is known by the audience (who is the audience?), are open game for non-authorial interpretations. Her fear is that any production that doesn’t conform to her view of the play is an inaccurate representation. Instead of excercising some artistic control, she says “one has just got to grit one’s teeth and let the thing run.”

Despite all of my nitpicking about her complaints, I am sympathetic to the underlying dissatistfaction that fuels Padmanabhan’s comments. It is incredibly frustrating to be misunderstood, especially if your ideas have been validated in a previous production. However, she cannot seem to make up her mind about how to deal with this disappointment. Indeed, she believes she shouldn’t have to do anything, not even exercise choice over where and how her work is performed. Instead she accuses others of acting in bad faith in an attempt to keep control of the interpretation after the performance. How can we view this other than having her cake and eating it too?

After government, he wants to go back to writing. I was given a book of Havel’s plays when I was in high school, and some of them are pretty good. Unfortunately, I missed out on seeing the production that Deb assistant directed in SF, so I’ve yet to see anything of his staged.

The playwright of Harvest, Manjula Padmanabhan, did not like our production. I have a lot of thoughts on her reaction, as well as some dismay at the angry (and disrespectful, I felt) reactions in the comments to her post. To put it bluntly, if she feels that the play has rarely been performed the way she wants it, why not rewrite it? Instead, she accuses the production of taking liberties with her script, liberties that I will argue are within the bounds of standard performance practice. Her two main complaints she has is that (a) the play was too long, and (b) it was too “ethnic.” In both cases, she “justifies” her reaction by claiming that the embellishments are external to her text and hence unsupported. Her complaints are with the effect and spectacle, and the authorial intent she writes about in her critique is applied inconsistently or contradicts the instructions given by the playtext.

The fundamental problem with Padmanabhan’s critique of the production stems from her apparent belief that the play text, as received, is transparent and entirely specified. I understand the difficulty of keeping editorial control over one’s work. Her complaint, however, is one-sided — the omissions are not mentioned, but the additions are castigated. Why not complain of certain lines being cut? Why not complain that the Contact Module did not sink “to floor level, making clicking, whirring sounds?” Her substantive point is that the production was/is too long (and I agree), but nowhere does the script indicate the pace of the production.

Padmanabhan makes herself out to be wronged:

…He [the director] has added at least an hour of performance time to the play, including lines, movements and moods that are in no way part of the original.

Let us take up these issues (lines, movements, and moods) one at a time. Having written a few plays myself, I am sensitive to the issue of lines being changed. The embellishments made to the text that bother her most are interjections, many in Hindi, which I will deal with later. No more text has been “added,” unless you count some shouts during a fight scene. Many lines were cut, but no complaint is made of that.

Turning to “movements”, it is true that the production is heavily choreographed. Padmanabhan never wrote in the introduction to the play that “the style of this piece is natural realism.” On my initial reading of the text in 2000 or so, I thought the play veered between melodrama and camp — the heightened unreality made it more effective to me. Apparently Sudipto Chatterjee (the director) believes that it endorses a gradual breakdown of reality. If the playwright truly has a strong opinion of how the play should look (c.f. Beckett), then that should come across in the text as well as the comments associated with the text. Her complaint again seems based on taste and aesthetics, couched in a claim that an injustice has been done to her written word.

If the added choreography is not the problem, then what about the missing choreography? In the last scene Jaya is supposed to be

… bathed in the unearthly radiance emanating from him [Jeetu]. She fidgets, knowing that she must avoid turning around. Behind her the figure crouches down, so that his head is level with hers. She can no longer bear the suspense. She turns.

Most actors would find such descriptions highly constraining, unless that is the character of the entire script. I would argue that most of the descriptions of this nature in the text are suggestive rather than proscriptive. They are inconsistent in frequency and Padmanabhan seems less concerned by their absence.

The final issue is that of “moods.” Here her complaint turns ugly, as she declares

By mid-play, I found myself wanting to drown the whole, whining, screaming, wailing, whimpering family of four grotesques — that’s what they had all become, human gargoyles — it seemed to me no-one could possibly care about what fate lay in store for such creatures.

Here is also where the “violation of the text” argument holds the least water. A play is meant to be interpreted — the “moods” inherent to a scene are those which are supportable by an interpretation and embodiment of the scene. The “mood” of each scene can and should be subject to interpretation — the only question is if it theatrically consistent and effective.

A second strand in her negative reaction is the “over-ethnicization” of the play. In the opening comments to the play she writes:

The DONORS and RECEIVERs should take on the racial identities, names, costumes, and accents most suited to the location of the production. It matters only that there be a highly recognisable distinction between the two groups, reflected in speech, clothing, and appearance. [emphasis mine]

Apparently, Padmanabhan wishes to be the arbiter of identity politics in every locale in which the play is produced! If the director is not allowed to make choices choices in “establishing the recognizable distinctions,” who is? The politics of race, ethnicity, and identity are very different in the United States than in India, and a performance that is powerful in one locale may be ineffectual in another.

In this vein, she is disturbed by our use of Hindi-isms:

For instance, he has permitted his actors to use a number of Hindi-isms such as “arre”, “beta” etc — which I find very hard to accept because (a) I am not a Hindi-speaker and specifically resisted falling back on ethnic touches of that sort while writing the play (b) the use of Hindi is a reminder that the family would never normally be speaking English and besides the actual words and terms are cliches, utterly colourless in themselves. I far prefer the play to inhabit a language-neutral space by remaining in ONE language, rather than attempting to balance uneasily between two.

The play is set in India, and there are very India-specific things in the text — the cadence of the English, various turns of phrase, and so on that mark the language as post-colonial Indian English. Indeed, it seems unnatural that the family should speak such English given their socioeconomic status. The extent to which Hindi phrases were added hardly puts the play “balancing uneasily between two” languages.

The introduction to her play states that “for the sake of coherence, this play is set in Bombay.” Her reason (a) is largely irrelevant — if she wanted to avoid Hindi, she could have set it in Madras. She could have easily set the play in “an unnamed city in the Third World” — would this have lessened its effect? — with characters having names that could change based on the context. Why not rewrite the play to make this more clear if it is her intention?

In her comments to the cast, Padmanabhan repeatedly insisted on the importance of the play’s “portability.” However, this seems to be a red herring — she is uncomfortable with the choices made to make the play work within the political context of ethnic politics in the US. Put another way, the aesthetic impositions of making “a highly recognizable distinction” here is not worth it to her. Indeed, she writes:

since I don’t feel the need to underline the fact that I’m Indian/SouthAsian, it is utterly unimportant — no, more than unimportant, actually UNATTRACTIVE — for me to make a big deal about that identity. I want to go the other way — I want to universalize the experience of being whatever — Asian/Indian/whatever — and to explore the notion of sameness-in-otherness. Whereas for this production, what seems to have overwhelmed the tone is the heavy spice of Indianness.

Padmanbhan’s expressed desire is for the production to play into the neocolonial meme of “sameness-in-otherness.” In the United States, ethnic distinctions are obliterated by being “other.” As one of the commenters, Shawn Jain, points out:

even at a school as liberal and supposedly multicultural as UC Berkeley, when most students here think of Indian performance, they think of bhangra, Bollywood, or that “Addictive” song by Truth Hurts.

Pop culture in the US reduces the complexity of the “other” into an index card’s worth of associations. While a universalist approach may work outside the center, in order to subvert those stereotypes for a general audience it is necessary to co-opt and twist them.

If the play is to be set in India, to complain that it is too Indian is a matter of aesthetics. If her intention was to remain in the abstract, then the play could have been written in that way, but it is crucial to remember that effective performance is most often about specificity and not about personified arguments dueling on stage.

This has been a long post, so I will sum up in brief. Manjula Padmanabhan’s critique of the UC Berkeley production of Harvest is fundamentally a matter of taste. She claims the production is too long because of excessive tampering with her text, but she has a double-standard when it comes to specific adherence to the script. She is uncomfortable with the ethnicization of the play for personal reasons — her stated (written) objectives support (to an extent) the choices made by the director in the production. In the end, she did not like the production for very good (and largely personal) reasons, but those reasons do not at the moment support her underlying assumption that the play has a canonical, obvious interpretation.

Manual trackback:
Amardeep Singh — Hullabaloo at the Berkeley Theater.

This is the current production in which I am acting. It opens tonight!

The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley presents:

HARVEST
(WEST COAST PREMIERE)
by Manjula Padmanabhan
Directed by Sudipto Chatterjee

A brilliantly comic exploration of the complex relations between developing and developed countries, Harvest stages a grisly pact between the first and third worlds. Set in India in the near future, a desperate man decides to sell his body parts to a wealthy client in exchange for a “Western” lifestyle for his family.

Durham Studio Theater
Dwinelle Hall
UC Berkeley Campus

November 11, 12*, 18, 19 at 8pm
November 13, 20 at 2pm
*Nov. 12 performance will be followed by a discussion with the playwright and director.

$14.00 General Admission
$10.00 UC Faculty/Staff
$8.00 Students/Seniors

Advance tickets are available from TicketWeb. For more information about tickets and other performances, programs, and events in our Department, please visit our website or phone our information hotline: 510-642-9925.

Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. It coincides nicely with a BBC radio programme of his more recent plays, including the harrowing Mountain Language.

Pinter presents a wonderful challenge to actors and directors alike. How can we make this play fresh and surprising? The biggest mistake is to think that because the text is so spare that it is somehow more malleable than other plays. What’s great about directing or acting in a Pinter scene is that when you’re doing it wrong, you can tell. It becomes boring, confusing, or too obvious very quickly. It makes you pay attention to details.

It’s interesting to see how Pinter dramatizes meanace and state oppression in an overt yet disguised way, versus Caryl Churchill’s more oblique approach in her (somewhat) recent play Far Away.

I’m working lights for this one-man show at Berkeley. The tech is kind of ballooning out of control, given that it’s supposed to be a workshop, but hopefully it will all work out.

UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies PRESENTS:

The Man of the Heart

Suman Mukherjee, eminent theater director from India and Townsend Center Visiting Artist in Residence, directs Assistant Professor Sudipto Chatterjee in an intercultural, interdisciplinary performance piece on the life, times, and music of Lalon Phokir, the saint-composer of the multi-religious Baul faith in Bengal.

September 22 at 7pm
September 23 at 4pm

The Sept. 23 performance will be followed by a discussion with the director and performer.

Durham Studio Theater
Free and open to the public

UPDATE : spelling error fixed. Some people have too much time on their hands.

“… a mountain climber’s axe! Can’t you get that through your skull?” — Trotsky’s Wife in David Ives’ Variations on the Death of Trotsky

I’m a blogging machine this morning.

This play is running for a little while longer at the Berkeley Rep and is definitely worth seeing. It tells the story of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple from its inception to the tragedy in Guyana where 912 people died to the present. The director/writer, Leigh Fondakowski, worked on the Laramie Project and this play follows the same format, telling the story through the words of the survivors and surrounding persons.

Jones led an interracial socialist Pentecostal-influenced church called the People’s Temple, starting in the late 50’s in Indiana, then moving to Ukiah, San Francisco, and finally Jonestown, a city they built in the jungles of French Guyana. In 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown and was shot along with 3 reporters. Then Jones ordered all the residents of Jonestown to take the potion. Over 900 residents complied, forcing their children to take the cyanide before taking it themselves. One of the survivors recalled watching his wife kill their child and arriving too late and holding them as they died. It was harrowing to hear it described.

The play is very good, although perhaps they should avoid so much singing in harmony, since their tuning is a little off (or perhaps someone was sick and it was just off that night). It suffers from a little imbalance of levity — in the first half you have ample time to laugh, and in the last half all the tragedy and dark side comes out. The actors are a strong ensemble, and they skillfully differentiate the roles they play.

I think everyone should see this play, especially if you know nothing (as I did) about the Jonestown tragedy.