At the heart of Gowri Ramnarayan’s WATER LILIES, which made its Mumbai debut at the Prithvi Theatre on 17th February 2008, is the juxtaposition of beauty with violence. Beauty as represented by nature and art and violence that is at once personal and universal, become a thematic refrain in the three, short plays that make up this production. The plays share other features too. They are all based in the US and each has two characters- a man and a woman of different racial origins, who happen to meet by chance in a public space.
Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the three, episode like plays is their search for meaning and stability or rather for that elusive truth in the chaos of everyday life. To that end, Claude Monet’s famed lilyscapes provide an inspirational and a symbolic reference to the accidental encounters of the characters in each of the plays. The paintings, which are projected in the background from time to time, are on the one hand a parallel text to the spoken word, while on the other they become the playwright’s tribute to Monet and his vision of enduring beauty. The select poems by Ted Hughes, Clark Ashton Smith and a verse from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad further serve to underline the conversations that take place in a park, a museum and an airport respectively.
These are deeply personal encounters in spite of their characters being perfect strangers. As confidences are exchanged, stories of pain, loss and insecurity emerge. Beneath these individual stories lurks the spectre of a larger and more collectively experienced grief such as that arising from the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But at the same time there is the feeling that the stories of these very individual characters (be they of the Telugu-speaking dietician who gets around speaking to a Cuban-American or of the Nobel prize-winning, Serbo-Hungarian novelist who cannot believe himself answering questions to a young, Tamilian Math teacher) are somewhat contrived to meet the larger issues of terrorism and violence that have assumed global proportions.
However there is no denying the remarkable ability on the playwright-director’s part to make these encounters seem very natural. There is a lifelike quality about them, which is further enhanced by good performances from the team of actors. For instance, Deesh Mariwala succeeds fairly well in his portrayal of a gay, Cuban-American, with a cause for saving the trees while Dhritiman Chaterji’s Serbo-Hungarian novelist is as confident and perceptive as he is anguished. Once again he is finely supported by Prateeksha Chandrashekhar, who plays the Tamilian Math teacher.
On the whole the production is minimalist in its approach and is structured beautifully with the help of projected slides in the background. The device of using a projector works particularly for the second story, which takes place in the Houston museum. It’s a touching piece, which takes on the title of the production and it effortlessly subsumes the visual narrative. The other highpoint of this production is the soundscape, provided by Anil Shrinivasan’s live Western, classical music. His keyboard barely gets a respite throughtout the performance but the music is as unobtrusive as it is evocative. Indeed it gives a new dimension to the play altogether.
In the end the stories may appear a little too convenient; they are more well-crafted than anything else but the playwright’s vision lends itself to some very thoughtful and key moments. And these are very nicely expressed. You come out thinking you have watched good theatre, which is after all a rarity these days.
*The writer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic keenly interested in Theatre & Performance Studies.
