I call it extraordinary not merely because it was a production that nudged the audience out of its usual receptive slumber and forced it into creating its own individual narratives around the play, but also because of the unlikely venue—a newly renovated Yalamaya Kendra that had been cemented over cracks running the length of its walls and ceiling—and the performance vignettes delivered by the three performers Ashant Sharma, Rajkumar Pudasaini and Mukherjee himself alongside slides projected on the ceiling, audio tracks and the live band Night gnashing out live music.
The audience, a carefully selected clutch of discerning artists/performers/musicians and intellectuals, sat huddled around the cement splattered walls, making space for Ashant Sharma as he took the stage lying prone on the dusty floor in our midst as the small-time gambler Erie Smith. While quotes, images and interviews of intense political content – be it from the McCarthy era, or victims of the civil war in Jaffna and from ex-President Rajapaksa – lit up the ceiling. Craning our necks to catch a glimpse of these, the audience was immediately given a key to the level of participation, both intellectual and emotional, that we were expected to bring to the play. For Waiting for Hughie was not the Eugene O'Neill play Hughie, which we were expecting to encounter that evening. It was a dialogue that the performers and the director entered into with the original text from an overarching South Asian location, and a specifically Nepali context. Born out of a workshop with the performers and One World Theater, the play retained certain monologues of the original 1942 O'Neill text but introduced much more, including poems by Bhupi Sherchan and Buddhisagar, silent physical maneuverings by Pudasaini and monologic interruptions from the director himself.
As the printed program said, perhaps strategically delivered post performance, 'the purpose of the piece is to peep into the director's mind as he rehearses the play' and free the original from the diction-delivery-costume axis, for 'classics aren't classics when they have lost their ability to be juxtaposed, morphed, transcreated, bent, slanted, twisted and even reduced to fragments.' Interestingly, the program was printed and stapled in a way that forced the reader to figure out a labyrinth of sentences going off mid-air, the rest to be found a few pages later, perhaps in sync with the play's structure?
What did gambler Erie Smith and the hotel's new night clerk, Charlie Hughes have to say? Excerpts from 1928 New York that uncannily encompassed and segued into our post-quake urban reality in Nepal. An example, 'bullshitting about development when your rivers are choppy and you're still figuring out how to send kids to school in Mugu', or 'brick after brick after brick and after days you drag out motionless bodies.' And the classic crowd-puller, 'we South Asians have two hearts—the World Bank on our left and the IMF on our right.'
Throughout the play Erie Smith keeps reminiscing about his magical time with Hughie, the night clerk who had just passed away, the one who came to conquer Everest but defected from Annapurna Base Camp to take up a job in a hotel and marry a girl from a Janakpur-bound bus. And offers insights into how human reality often leaps across time and race to find economic and cultural resonances.
Mukherjee's own rant-like utterances and interruptions that seemed to emit from a trance-like state, risked slipping into inanity but somehow managed to retain intellectual integrity. Most memorable moment being, 'where are you Hughie? The characters have all died and we are still waiting for you to join us at the play!'
Rajkumar Pudasaini was unbelievably intense in his silent, performative gestures as a seeker as well as in his renderings of the poems, which were counterpointed ideally by effervescent Ashant Sharma's spirited delivery of monologues. The poems by Bhupi Sherchan and Buddhisagar were characters in themselves, shedding light on lived reality. Night played beautifully subservient to the text, a welcome change I must say!
And yes, they both die. We actually encountered the Erie and Charlie's tarpaulin-covered bodies on the way as we straggled out of the enclosure. The much-advertised donation box went missing, as did the comments-register. But we waited patiently for we had been trained well by then, waiting as we were for Hughie.
I heard they had performances later at Theater Village too, where they moved the audience around. I for myself was already too drenched in the Yalamaya Kendra one to tiptoe into another one. What we encountered was O'Neill's Hughie only partially, as a play waiting to happen, and experienced instead the full reality of our time and location through the art performance called Waiting for Hughie.
Thank you One World Theater and Parnab Mukherjee for stretching our horizon of expectations a wee bit more!
The author is an Indian artist/actor/writer based in Kathmandu. She can be reached at kurchi.dasgupta@gmail.com.
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