In my never-ending quest for cheap or free things to do around the city, I found that Club freeTime had a listing about a play called "No Poem No Song" by the Subjective Theater Company at the Kraine Theater down in the Novelito-East Village area. The playbill said it was a combination of Hindu storytelling, music, and theater; being interested in the culture that has arisen along with Hinduism, I was intrigued and so reserved some tickets.
The Kraine Theater is a tiny hole-in-the-wall venue, probably once a very deep and spacious apartment. Thus, it was intimate and probably held at most 60 patrons. It was like being transported to the old movie theaters of the 1950s, with red faux-velvet chairs and low-rise seating. I settled into my seat next to my friend, excited and apprehensive for what I was about to see.
The play opened with some bongo-like music, and the spirit Eshu narrating about the gods and the beginning of the universe, bidding us to come follow after him into the story. An intriguing start, to be sure - all of a sudden, three revolving panels at the back of the stage opened, spitting forth about twelve more characters, and the stage was suddenly awash with people. With little further ado, the story jumped right into the middle, with the god Ganesh stepping up to confront Eshu, his ostensible uncle/spirit/guardian of "the Crossroads" to show him the way to Mom, the ultimate creator of the universe whom no one ever saw or talked to because she was too sacred. Ganesh announced that he was the god Ganesh, so the audience was able to tack a name and character to face and body, but immediately, the scene changed.
A snappy young businesswoman steps onstage between Ganesh and Eshu, asking if this were the beginning of the story, and if it were, why she wasn't in it. I suppose it wasn't the beginning of her part in the larger story, but the play did not make that clear. Instead, she goes around looking for her mom, who begins to tell her about her day. The daughter, Amy, must confront her mother about a "manifesto" her mother has written about the people who watch her and want to kill her and her family: her children Amy and Mike, who has an unexplained past which probably deals with insanity. Mike, who is a homosexual, breezes onstage (like he has breezed out of his sister's and mother's lives, Amy hints) and calms his mother down by telling her what she wants to hear.
At about this time, the scene shifts again, going back to "the beginning" when the goddess Parvati-Kali sees that her husband Shiva has killed their son Ganesh by beheading him; it was a mistake, as Shiva did not know it was his son because he had just been born three hours before. But somehow, this is still not "the beginning" and they go back to the time when Parvati-Kali and Shiva were throwing a party for their firstborn child (also somehow Ganesh). This child is also killed because a spirit attending the party looks at him and turns him into wool.
Back to the mortal family. The mortal mother details the destruction of the universe in her manifesto, saying that a god who keeps poison in his throat is controlling demons which will hang about everyone and somehow destroy them. The storyline was very similar to the creation of the universe Ganesh and Eshu mention earlier, but that connection was not drawn out. Exactly how the mother arrives at her manifesto is unclear, as well, and we are left wondering if she is a spirit in mortal form, if she has been possessed, or she is just crackpot-crazy. With further information revealed in the play, one might suppose she has been possessed by a god or spirit, but her role in the play remains unclear, as she is meets her death and is buried by her two children in her native West Indies on Grenada.
Is it about here that the storyline switches again? Or was it earlier? You can see how much whiplash this play has given me. And we aren't even to intermission yet. We still have to talk about the destabilization of the gods (when things go south, to whom do the gods themselves pray? ... Exactly, says Lord Brahma), the fact that mortal Mike is really the reincarnation of the poet Vyasa who has been lost for 3,000 years but whose soul has been hiding out in Brooklyn which the gods conveniently cannot see, Ganesh wants to end the suffering of all people and thinks that by destroying Shiva's opium fields he'll make his father hear and see clearly the pain in the world, Mara the spirit of attachment's bid for sovereignty, and Mike's attempted suicide. Oh and a war between gods and spirits, which somehow Ganesh and Mike can solve together.
There was simply way too much going on in this play. I thought about how the play had multiple beginnings, dealt with multiple narratives and whose stories are important, asked about the gods' powers and why things are the way they are, and it would have been interesting to talk about stories, narratives, and voices, and how we determine whose voices are heard. Those questions would have been enough to occupy the theoretical component of the play, but I had no time to process them before we were on to another scene and the play asked yet more half-coherent questions. It was far, far too much.
The acting was fair; sometimes it was difficult to understand what someone was saying, and better staging choices could have been made for some of the characters to make their ideas and intentions clearer. I saw the play with a dramaturg, and she was especially interested in Mara, spirit of illusion and attachment, and how much more could have been done with him. In the middle of the second act, I realized that this was a pastiche of a play - little character depth and little connection. It was more like puppets were being moved around on a stage. (For example, the goddess Parvati-Kali and Shiva were fighting and destroying each other's followers all because Parvati-Kali felt snubbed that Shiva had forgotten her birthday 3,402 years before.) At this point, I kind of checked out and was anxious for the play to end.
The ending seemed like the beginning to me. Ganesh ended up possessing Mike, and through him revolutionized the world, freed people, broke down barriers, opened their minds. It sounded like a load of hippie crap that a seventh grader would put into a play: alluding to abstract ideals without concretely showing us how those ideals were achieved. Ganesh and Mike becoming a composite being should have been at the beginning of the play, and how they "liberated" people should have been the plot of the play.
Content aside, the costuming was simple, a few motley tokens which stood for what plane of existence the character was on - be it god, spirit, or mortal. The same goes for the staging - practically an empty set except for a few chairs. Inexpensive and dynamic.
Overall, the content of the play got 1.5 stars out of 5 because it tried to do too much. Costuming got a 3.7 and staging a 3.0, and acting a 3.4.
One of the writers of "No Song No Poem" is a zen master. One of the methods of zen is to get you to let go of attachments and accept emptiness (a theme briefly touched upon at the end of the play) by shocking you out of the way you typically think. If the multiple beginnings, multiple stories, and whiplash back-and-forth scenes between gods and mortals were supposed to shock me into a new way of thinking, it was not successful. If that was the director's/playwrights' intents, it should have been clearer (let go, let go, let go of these attachments and illusions). Otherwise, the writers were being too zen and too postmodern for their own good.
This is an instance that proves the old adage, "You get what you pay for."
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