[Seagull Books; 2023]
Tr. from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale
It is oddly life-affirming to be an audience member in Satish Alekar’s plays about death. Two Plays, translated from Marathi by Shanta Gokhale and published by Seagull Books, juxtaposes Alekar’s much-lauded 1974 play The Grand Exit (Mahanirvan) with his newest work, 2020’s A Conversation with Dolly (Thakishi Samvad), both of which are accompanied by interviews with the playwright. In The Grand Exit, a dead man begs his son to cremate him after the local crematorium is closed to the public. A Conversation with Dolly follows a dying playwright whose musings on life during the COVID-19 lockdown grow increasingly bizarre. Both plays deal with tragedy, and A Conversation with Dolly mines the troubling themes that marked the COVID-19 era effectively, but both plays are written and staged with a self-awareness of their performative form, and Alekar often delights in toying with his audiences. Gokhale’s translation brings this out in puns and word play that highlight the fumbling nature of Alekar’s characters. In Two Plays, Alekar’s sense of whimsy, bolstered by the translator’s ear for colloquialism, becomes an antidote to the intellectually stifling nature of the modern world.
Alekar’s interview with Rekha Inamdar-Sane, conducted for the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Grand Exit is particularly instructive. “I saw my first plays from the wings,” he tells her, “Perhaps that is why I grew up thinking that plays were a lie . . . If that is so, why bother to display these things to the viewers? Let them have a direct view of the wings.” Some of the thrill of Alekar’s plays comes from this attitude. The Grand Exit utilizes the keertan form of storytelling to help the dead Bhaurao narrate his travails in the afterlife. In keertan, a performer combines narration, singing, and call-and-response chanting to describe legends or spiritual journeys. While legends about deities are usually told, here keertan is played for laughs, as when Bhau worries about his attractive wife left alone with admiring neighbors (“Hail Ramaa hail! We love butter on our bread,” he imagines them singing to her). But when the characters make direct reference to the play, the reader/audience becomes implicated in the play directly. “What a fuss you created at the end of Act One,” Bhau scolds his son later on, “Thank god it ended when it did. Otherwise, I’d have had to haul you home on my back.” He’s at the mercy of the playwright, but so are we.
The audience is similarly implicated in A Conversation with Dolly, where otherworldly caretaker Dolly sees to the character of the aging playwright in his final days. “We are not in a play,” the old man assures us, “Between you and me, acting is not my strongest suit.” Later, Dolly asks us, “Are you there? Or are we on Zoom or something? I don’t know what’s going on here.” As the more recent piece, A Conversation with Dolly gives the impression of being lost in the wilds of the internet. We never quite know where “there” is. Instead, we inhabit a void littered with Amazon boxes and half-truths, encircled by political violence. In an interview with Gokhale, Alekar says A Conversation with Dolly was an outlet for the anger he felt at the assassinations of left-wing politicians and thinkers Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi, and Gauri Lankesh. “The old man is facing physical death. But I was seeing in that the death of the writer. You cannot write if you are not allowed to think.”
The anger is palpable in A Conversation with Dolly in a way that it isn’t in The Grand Exit. Like Dolly, the premise of The Grand Exit runs on the absurdity of the modern capitalist world. The entire reason Bhau cannot be cremated in a timely fashion is because the old crematorium has been privatized and he must rely on his son Nana to navigate municipal bureaucracy. The fancy new crematorium set up on the other side of the chawl is rejected by Bhau, despite boasts that “citizens who burn their dead in the incinerators will be able to collect ashes within 25 minutes.” Similarly interwoven is the absurdity of Hindu funeral rites as reflected in Bhau’s stubbornness as his body decomposes (“I will not burn in this crematorium even if I have to die not doing it. I mean even if I’m dead.”) and the hijinks the chawl gets into while mourning (Two residents fighting over a funeral rite involving rice balls: “Did your pop ever place his balls like this?” “How dare you talk about my father’s balls! I’ll slap you!”). The waggish way Alekar teases out these themes in The Grand Exit is largely eclipsed by the propaganda and violence of the Hindutva project in A Conversation with Dolly.
The playwright in A Conversation with Dolly offers a warning about what Alekar calls the “elevation of mindless ideas about science and history.” The majority of the play involves the dying playwright’s obsession with a string from a waist cord he found in his father’s bookstore. Left to his own devices, he spins a yarn about its literary and historical significance and develops a conspiracy theory about its link to mind-reading technology that is delivered to the audience in the tenor of tech-bro disruptor. Dolly tells us he never quite takes a stand in India’s frayed political discourse, and the effects here are obvious—he’s unable to tell a coherent story or develop a rigorous perspective due to the repression and isolation he lives under.
Despite this grim picture, in form, Alekar reaffirms our sense of possibility. In a section on the playwright’s alternative history of the waist cord, Dolly shares decontextualized photographs via QR code that string together a nonsense timeline, implicating Alexander the Great, Einstein, and George Floyd’s killer Derek Chauvin into the history of the waist cord. Some of the photos are funny, some are shocking, some disturbing—but the effect is powerful on the page (and on screen) for the striking dissonance between the captions and photos. In his interview with Gokhale, Alekar says he had thus far only performed the play in private homes to groups of ten or fifteen people using a television screen to broadcast these images, but imagined a stage performance where they would appear as holograms. “It would underline the idea of something real and solid being turned into an unreal fantasy.” The vision he demonstrates here is an answer to the playwright’s stultifying environment.
In his interview with Rekha Inamdar-Sane, Alekar makes the case for drifting into fantasy: “My friend and colleague Dr. Jayant Joshi would say, ‘There goes Satish, wool-gathering.’ Why should this not happen to characters in a play?” Reverie is often at odds with the pace and threats of the world, but is necessary to make art. In The Grand Exit, a young Alekar moves dreamily through a series of contrivances that delight as they question the norms of Hindu society. But it’s the way he breaks out of the claustrophobic world of A Conversation with Dolly that underscores the urgent need to wander outside of form and be curious about the world. What happens in the space between life and death? Two Plays suggests: Anything you can imagine.
Alana Mohamed is sometimes a writer and librarian from Queens, NY. Mostly she writes emails. Occasionally she posts on Twitter @alanamhmd.
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