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Poignancy at play

"The Shadow Box" may not have been consistently taut, but it achieved intimacy and drew in the audience at crucial moments

PHOTO: S. R. RAGHUNATHAN

STARK THEME From "The Shadow Box"

Mithran Devanesen has a knack of choosing plays, which have something distinctive about them in form (don't forget, he is a veteran set and lighting designer) and substance (he knows the stage as an actor). Michael Cristofer's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Shadow Box", staged by The Madras Players, gave him ample scope to play on his strengths.

The theme is stark: three terminally-ill persons await death in a secluded cottage, supported by family members and friends. Each unit has a clear-cut socio-political, economic, emotional and intellectual identity. And muddles, pretences, self-deceptions.

Luggage-toting, ever-nagging wife Maggie (Indrani Krishnaier) comes to visit Joe (Nilu) with pony-tailed, guitar-glued son (David Weston). Unable to face the prospect of Joe's imminent death, or disclose it to the boy, she refuses to leave the steps of the cottage, as if the act of entering is an admission of doom.

Brian's (P. C. Ramakrishna) book-lined drawing room shows the dying academic and his boyfriend Mark (Rishi Raj), startled and then comforted by a visit from feisty, liquor-swilling ex-wife Beverley (Gayathri Sriram). She sees what Mark cannot, "He's dying, I'm drunk, you're pissed off."

In the kitchen, wheelchair-bound Felicity (Visalam Ekambaram) despises her slow, dim, unlovely daughter Agnes ("Taken after her father," she explains) and is "lonely for Claire," the runaway daughter. Hiding Claire's death, Agnes (Antara Hazarika) writes letters from the sister to perk up Mom, almost believing her own vicarious role-playing. Felicity refuses to die until Claire comes home.

Set design

The set design balanced the three interactive areas, with neutral seats upfront for counselling sessions. Forced to sacrifice directorial omniscience, Devanesen as interviewer pitched his voice just right — apparently clinical, but exposing vulnerabilities of the interrogator and those of his patients.

The lighting (Manasi Subramaniam) criss-crossed elemental fear with a range of subsidiary feelings, and quietly, as befitting the forbidding subject. The play's complex speech design interweaves dialogue and monologue with repartees and refrains — sprayed from every part of the stage — meshing like notes in a tune. Except for some initial unevenness, the sound was well managed, and firm in the multi-ricocheting finale.

"The Shadow Box" took some time to gain momentum. The stiffness melted and the play quickened to life when the actors dropped assumed accents. The actors knew the subtext, and brought off nuances in speech, though not all were able to match them in body language.

Cristofer keeps sentimentality at bay with jaunty quips, delivered with expertise by Ramakrishna. But the situation is too chilling for anything more than muffled laughter. His spurt of melodrama irked, until you realised that the exaggeration was typical of a man flailing about to find his soul after a lifetime of emotional atrophy. Visalam scored with her sense of timing; so did Gayathri with her internalisation of the role.

Cristofer's plight inheres in the wordsmith Brian's discovery that words fail at the irreversible moment of death. When his wife wanted to dance, Brian gave her a lecture on the history of dance. He concludes that "life is not a syllogism, it is a miracle. And that is reason for dancing."

True, the performance was not consistently taut, but the play achieved intimacy, and drew the audience in at crucial moments.

It had no tragic catharsis or epiphany. But it did sound like a moving chorus of voices, in a communitarian experience, not self-indulgent — individual angst choreographed with a love for life and for the theatre that highlights it. The teamwork turned the climax into incantation, piercing through the shadows, celebrating the miracle of this sound, this sight, this smell, this touch, "This moment."

This play was staged as part of The Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Festival at The Music Academy on August 5.

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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