Showing posts with label Directors ViewPoint. Show all posts

I AND YOU - A Popular Story With Unconventional Story Tellers

Lauren Gunderson is one of the most produced playwrights in the country right now, and I and You is one of her more frequently produced plays. Including Pratidhwani and Theater Schmeater's co-production that starts performances Oct 18th, there have been three productions or readings of it in Seattle in 2018 alone, and a fourth is already scheduled for early 2019.


This play was originally written to be performed by a white actress and a black actor. The playwright’s guidance, however, allows for performers of other ethnicities to be cast in it, as long as the two actors are not of the same race. With Pratidhwani’s mission to create more opportunities for artists of South Asian descent in mind, we naturally, approached this play from a different lens right from the beginning, and arrived at our casting of an Indian American Caroline, and a Japanese American Anthony.


What has made the process more exciting for us, is to explore how that casting choice changes Caroline, or Anthony, or their respective parents and their family dynamics. How some of the lines in the play might take on a slightly different meaning, and how breaking the standard of “default expectations” makes this production just a little different, while very much being a part of the collective, part of the current zeitgeist - continuing the conversation the playwright has started. We hope you will join us, witness the production yourself, and share your experience with us. www.pratidhwani.org/iandyou
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Conflict, Compromise, and Bees

By Agastya Kohli

“It is not given to man to know the whole Truth”, Mahatma Gandhi is quoted to have said. “His duty lies in living up to the truth as he sees it. God alone knows absolute Truth. Therefore I have often said, Truth is God.” He then goes on to say, “Relative truth is all we know. Therefore we can only follow the truth as we see it.”

Agastya Kohli
Artistic Director, Drama Wing
We are witnessing a time when it seems, the two halves of this country firmly believe in only their relative truth - as they see it. Amazingly, when confronted with the same exact facts, the two sides draw up completely opposite conclusions, which are equally obvious to each of them. 

Truth it appears, can contradict itself. Or how we perceive it, can certainly be contradictory.

Queen by Madhuri Shekar is a brilliant study of the nature of truth. In it, one relative truth, as Ariel knows it, is that Monsanto’s pesticides are destroying honeybee populations. The other truth, as Arvind tells it, is that Monsanto are innovators and job creators. While this knowledge will absolutely color the way they (and we) perceive Monsanto, they are both “living up to the truth” as they see it, unknowingly following Gandhi’s example!

Mathematics is Sanam’s truth. Without mathematical evidence, all claims are anecdotal. But Prof. Hayes tells us “mathematics isn’t a direct path to god, to the universe.” It too can lead to different results when the same data is examined from different perspectives.

Understanding the nature of truth isn’t necessarily about looking at the picture from the other side, walking in someone else’s shoes. While that might help us understand the other person’s relative truth, it certainly doesn’t negate what we hold as self evident. What is perhaps needed then, is compromise.

But is compromising one’s truth a betrayal of God’s trust? Or is it the only way to get things done?

To quote Gandhi again, “in matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth. When you know the truth, the truth makes you a soldier.” 

Gandhi changed the world. His commitment to his relative truth was near absolute.  However, absolute commitment to a relative truth can not lead to compromise - only to conflict. Conflict in which friendships, careers, reputations - all can get destroyed, that compromise might salvage.

Conflict makes for good drama. Each character committed to their own truth, to their own God. Hope you’ll make time to come and see Queen - a play about truth, about compromise, and about bees.
For tickets and more information, visit 
https://www.pratidhwani.org/queen 

Queen
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You Know What I Mean?


When I first came to the United States, I encountered some differen
ces in how people used English in this country, and how I understood it. I wouldn’t quite call it a language barrier, but it certainly was enough of a gap to create misunderstandings and miscommunication.

To give you an example, I finished eating my meal at a restaurant, and asked the waiter to bring me the bill. He shook his head and responded, “I’ll give you the check. You’ll give me the bill.” It was much later, when I found myself using the term “dollar bill” to describe what I had always called a “dollar note” growing up, that I fully understood what the waiter had meant!

Mother in Another Language by Taniya Hossain is full of such moments, where everyone speaks the same language, but not everyone hears the same thing. As Karen - who you will meet when you come to see the play - says, “it’s like having multiple languages in your head, each saying something slightly different!”

My father - a professor of literature - talks about a socio-linguistic phenomenon that he calls “filling in a meaning”. Every word has a meaning, and when the same word gets used in a different context, a new meaning gets attached to that same word. In this way, new meanings keep getting poured into the same word, and the language continues to grow.

Miscommunication occurs when one speaker uses a word in one context, and another interprets that same word slightly differently due to his or her own preconceptions about what that word actually means.

Sometimes it’s not even the meaning - but the connotation associated with a word. Connotations can be even more inconsistent from one English speaking part of the world to another, and can lead to people being offended where no offense was intended, simply because a particular word was used, which in their part of the world is loaded differently!

If I had to pick an alternate title for this play, I would pick a line that Tarak says in act 2 - “I can’t control how you understand my words.” This one sentence describes so much of what is going on in this play, and in the world around us.

Our inability to truly understand what the other person is saying because of the cultural or social preconceptions we are burdened with is perhaps responsible for so many disagreements and wars throughout human history. Everything is relative to our point of reference, and when we assume, pretend, or worse, insist that the other person’s point of reference must be the same as ours - that’s just asking for trouble.

Yes, this is a play about the interaction of two dissimilar cultures - but more than that, this is a play about people, and ultimately how similar we are, and how we all want the same things, and are looking for the same reassurances and guarantees in life. Only, if we would hear each other truly, see each other with open eyes, and understand each other with open hearts. You know what I mean?
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