What was the inspiration for - and subsequent genesis of - your play, Kalighat?
Kalighat is based on my experiences working as a volunteer at Mother Teresa's first home for the dying and destitute in Calcutta. After my first stint there, I began writing about it and did some workshopping of the play in the Lab at Circle Repertory Company. That was invaluable, but I felt I needed to let the experience of Kalighat sit for a while longer so that I could get a better perspective on what it really meant to me and how I could go about conveying it in a theatrical way. The play then sat in a drawer for several years until I decided it was time to revisit it and India. I made another two trips to Calcutta and Kalighat to see how it had changed and to see if I had gained enough perspective to begin writing again. Calcutta had changed a lot, Kalighat, not so much. It did become clearer to me what it was I needed to write about, and who the audience was that I was writing for. We did a couple of readings, then a pretty elaborate workshop at Circle East (formerly the Circle Rep Lab), which was funded by the Joyful Noise Fund at Chashama. Aroon Shivdasani of the Indo-American Arts Council saw that workshop and said that she wanted to produce the play. Because it is such a big piece, with so many actors, we had to figure out a way to produce it that was affordable. The Baruch Performing Arts Center came on board as a co-producer when we conceived of a festival of South Asian works with Kalighat as the centerpiece. So not only were we producing this big play, but we were doing it in rep (including changeovers) with South Asian dance, music, comedy, film and visual arts. It was a lot more work, but it ended up utilizing the real estate and other production elements more efficiently and kept the costs down while increasing the earned income potential. Gosh, I'm sounding more like a producer than a writer. But actually, there never would have been a genesis of the play had I not thought like a producer to some degree.
What does the title mean?
Literally, it means "the place of" or "the steps of" Kali, referring to the Hindu goddess of destruction. A story goes that Kali was in a battle that created such a fury that she exploded and parts of her body landed in different parts of the Indus Valley. Those places are all held sacred. Her "angul," (finger or toe) landed on the banks of the Hoogley where the city of Calcutta was subsequently built. On that site sits an important temple to Kali that draws pilgrims from all over. The neighborhood surrounding the temple is called Kalighat. There had been a sort of hostel for the pilgrims adjacent to the temple, which was given to Mother Teresa in the late 1940s to create her first home. Although the Missionaries of Charity gave the home the name "Nrimal Hriday," or "place of the pure heart," the home is almost always referred to by the nuns, workers and others who know it, as Kalighat.
Both Kalighat and your current production, Gehri Dost, touch on homosexuality and South Asian culture. What's your interest in both of those topics?
I've had an interest in South Asia since I was a kid. Maybe it's because my older sister had an interest in Latin America and I wanted to be different. Maybe it's because during a wave of Indian immigration to the U.S. in the 70's, my mother dragged me along to welcome the new neighbors who happened to be from India. I remember being about half way there when she slammed on the breaks of our old blue Chevy that stalled at every stop sign, and said, "Oh, no! I can't bring them a pot roast." All she really knew about India was the sacred cow thing, so we had to turn around and make chocolate chip cookies instead. Well, who knows if they were vegetarian or not, but the wife and the sister-in-law came to talk about India to my Catholic school kindergarten class the next year. They dressed in beautiful silk saris, dragged a lot of Indian tchotchkes along and were far more fascinating than the other adult speakers who came to talk to us about their lives as stock brokers or accountants or whatever. And although they were exotic looking to us thirty or so homogenous kindergartners in Minnesota, the fact that they were there in front of us, answering questions and telling stories about their lives and culture gave a real human face to a place that seemed too far away to even be real. I guess that instilled in me a desire to actually go there, discover it for myself.
It's a bit troublesome to use the word "homosexuality" in a South Asia context, because, like the word "gay," it is a western construct used to describe not just sexual behavior, but a whole slew of socio-politic phenomenon that are very Euro-American centric. It might be convenient for us to impose these terms on other cultures, but in truth, they don't do a very good job of describing the uniqueness of the experience of people who are marginalized by their sexuality in much of the world. Now, I don't mean to "orientalize" or "exoticize" same-sex behavior in South Asia by saying that. Fundamentally, I suppose it's the same thing as anywhere else: an individual who is innately attracted erotically or sexually to people of the same sex. But beyond that, there are many cultural influences that color the experience in ways that can be quite different from the experience in the west. In Gehri Dosti, an Indian man says to his American lover, "No, you're gay, I'm just a man-who-loves-men, and now it is time for me to take a wife."
In Kalighat, the journeys of the central characters have to do with psycho-sexual development at the intersection of spirituality. The choice of celibacy as part of a spiritual path is just as important for many of the characters as is the expression of sexuality in a physically active, eroticized way. I guess because the play shows the same-sex behavior more graphically, people tend to focus on that. But the character of Peter is really bisexual, if we are to go by Western "identity-politic" definitions. His relationship with Sydney is very much based on a sexual attraction which could easily have been acted on had she not been working towards taking a vow of celibacy. Marina is out with the boys every night after work at Kalighat, and the story of Sister Jane and her attraction to Klaus is, I believe, as strong an exploration of repressed physical desire as is the story of Philip and the repression and ultimate following of his same-sex desire. It's interesting to me that within this discussion, it is often women's sexuality that tends to get invisibilized or ignored.
But you're right, there is a strong focus on same-sex attraction and behavior, particularly among men in Kalighat, and how it can relate to religious constructs both in the east and the west . In Gehri Dosti: 5 Short Plays with a South Asian Bent the same-sex theme in South Asia is more specifically explored, even as it is experienced among women. Most all of the plays are based on true events. I chose to use the short form because it gave me an opportunity to touch on many of the intricacies of same-sex behavior in South Asia in a way that developing a theme in a full-length play would not allow. By the end of Gehri Dosti, we should really have a broad sense of what the experience is, rather than a deep idea of a single aspect. It's just a choice I made.
I had been doing HIV/AIDS work in NY in the late 80s and again in the mid 90s. When I had the opportunity to go back to India to work on Kalighat, I was curious about the situation with HIV/AIDS there. There was a tremendous amount of denial about its prevalence as well as the existence of same-sex behavior in South Asia. In fact, this seems to be true throughout the developing world for one reason or another depending on the place. Yet the facts of transmission routes of HIV and the truths of human behavior remain, and ignoring those truths in the face of millions dying each year seems to me to be engaging in a kind of passive genocide, whether by politicians, the medical/research community, funders, activists or religious zealots.
You not only wrote Kalighat and Gehri Dost, but you also directed them, as well. How does one inform the other, for you, in general? And, what are some of the benefits - and disadvantages - of directing your own play?
Well, even if they're fighting it's easy to get the director and writer in the same room together. And if the collaboration isn't working well, you know who to point the finger at. I don't always direct my own work, but nor do I think it is always a bad idea as some do.
Regardless, in the case of Kalighat and Gehri Dosti, there is a complexity of issues and specificity of the cultural context that is hard to understand, yet alone reveal to an audience, by a western trained director who has not been to the places or done a tremendous amount of research on the subject.
For instance, the character of Mahvi in Eating Jain, one of the plays of Gehri Dosti, is Jain. Now, it's rare to find anyone in the west who knows much about Jainism, if anything at all. And even with the advent of the internet, it's hard to research many of the subtleties. Because of his spiritual practice, Mahvi does not habitually engage in a "fight or flight" kind of behavior pattern that most of us post-Freud westerners expect, particularly when creating conflict based drama. So to impose that kind of conflict/resolution approach to the play (which a good, albeit ill-informed director should do) is to miss an essential element of the character that risks changing the play rather than revealing it. Ultimately, those kind of director choices unwittingly place a judgment on the South Asian aspect of the play that can leave it false and out of balance.
Likewise with Kalighat, it is vitally important to me that the truth of the place as I experienced it not be shaped or altered by too uninformed a vision. So much has been written about Mother Teresa, from adulation to condemnation, that everyone has a bias. That's not what I'm interested in. I am interested in creating this very important place theatrically in the most realistic way possible. I am interested in seeing actors live in it and allow the lives of their characters to unfold, change, grow and end in the way that it does for people at Kalighat. I have had dozens of directors over the years tell me they want to do the piece, but I've never once had a director say that they would actually go to Kalighat, that they wanted to see, smell, touch and engage in the place so that they would know how the dust settles in the corners. Without that experience, I don't understand how a vision of the place can be realized that doesn't remain too far removed from its reality. I want my audience in NYC to be transported to a real place, not an idea of a real place. Why should they settle for less?
I guess the biggest disadvantage of directing my own work is that it makes it difficult to address re-writing during the rehearsal process. I really have to be present as a director at that time, which robs me of the ability to be objective as a writer in that part of the process. I've had to compensate by working really hard to get the scripts into the best shape possible before going into rehearsal. I am able to do some re-writing, cutting, whatever, but it's been invaluable to have workshop processes leading up to production for that reason.
You are the Executive Director of Circle East Theater Company, which was formerly the Circle Repertory Company Lab. How did the company evolve from one into the other?
When Circle Rep closed in 1996 due to financial problems, Michael Warren Powell, who had been the Artistic Director of the lab at Circle, decided that he wanted to carry the work forward by starting a company of his own. We incorporated Circle East in 2000.
Is it Circle East's intent to take up where Circle Rep left off, or is the company pursuing a different mission and set of goals?
I don't think it is our intent to necessarily take up where Circle Rep left off. Circle Rep has a unique history and rich legacy that needs to be kept intact and recognized for its own special place just like many of the important companies throughout history. However, I think Michael's vision is to bring forward the vision and ethic that was expressed by the artists of Circle Rep, many of whom remain with us at Circle East, in a way that is cogent to this time. The basic mission is the same, developing and producing new plays, but that's true of many companies. I guess the difference is in the how, which we try to look to the legacy of Circle for guidance, and the who, which is not only the old and new Circle artists, but also a new audience that needs to be reached and engaged in an ever-changing way.
What's your take on the current artistic climate of both New York, and the rest of the country? Are we in good shape or not?
Oh, I guess we are in as bad shape as ever, and things are as good as they have ever been. I think there was only about two weeks in the history of American theater when everything seemed to be rosy, and that really just meant commercially viable. It's unfortunate that brief period gets used as a kind of gage. But there have been fervent times artistically when things were most bleak economically. And having lots of resources doesn't necessarily mean great art will emerge, in fact it may be possible to prove the contrary. I think that it has gotten harder for the artists though, the ones who don't have anything to capitalize on commercially, or refuse to. They keep getting pushed to deeper, darker more distant basements, or told that they must privilege business acumen above artistic integrity by middlemen who are often just eating up the limited funding nut. The artists are expected to revitalize neighborhoods and then booted out. But I don't know that it does any good to complain. It's just the nature of the culture that artists are reflecting and expressing in their work. If it were different, the work would be different.
What kind of work - be it a play, a movie, a book, etc. - really inspires you or blows you away, artistically?
The medium isn't that important to me. It can be anything as long as it works, makes me laugh, makes some connection, reveals something to me about humanity or the universe that I didn't know.
Have you seen or read anything lately that you really liked?
We read a play called Second Acts by Bruce Ward in a Circle East company meeting a couple of weeks ago. It moved and inspired me particularly in how successful it was in its effort to memorialize the kind of huge events that are so difficult, if not impossible, to memorialize without diminishing - the holocaust, HIV/AIDS, 9/11.
What have you got lined up for yourself after Gehri Dost finishes its run?
I'm producing Circle East's next production of Shoe Palace Murray, by William M. Hoffman and Anthony Holland, which will open in April at Baruch's Bernie West Theater. There is some talk about moving Gehri Dosti, as well as bringing it out to other communities. I'm working on a couple of new plays, and I have a lot of filing to do.