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Shiv
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
The Theatre @ Boston Court
Through August 9
RECOMMENDED:
The recurrent dramatic question of our own lives plausibly could be what it means to embrace the consciousness of another day (i.e., getting out of bed). For Shiv (the emotionally pellucid Monika Jolly), eponymous protagonist of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s captivating play in its west coast premiere at The Theatre @ Boston Court, arguably her imaginative life is so fecund that she needn’t escape the confines of her irremediably creased childhood mattress — as if she could.
The immigrant child of a doting Hindu father, Bapu (Dileep Rao), himself an irretrievably embittered Punjabi poet (and ostensibly the first true modernist bard in the language), Shiv is stuck between reconciling herself to the common paradox of love for and disillusion with a parent, and venturing into the New World to which she would be far better equipped to adapt than he. Shiv has inherited a literary soul, ingeniously captured in a conceptually simple but complexly subtle production.
Similarly, Kapil’s writing skims along familiar thematic lines, deceptively so, since gradually a most intricately embroidered tapestry of imagery and allusion coalesces into an original vision of what might be otherwise sloughed off as another exotic immigrant coming-of-age narrative.
Nicknamed for Shiva, who can take many forms but most familiarly as a goddess of destruction (in our culture, best known through Dr. Oppenheimer’s reaction to the first nuclear blast), Kapil’s Shiv is so infectiously creative in her memories and eloquent in her reticence that it is often too easy to forget that her existential depression is so profound.
Though Shiv as storyteller so filters her narrative with fancy that it cannot be certain her experiences had been real, she does venture from sulking in Skokie to serving as a caretaker at an idyllic lakeside retreat owned by an American family whose fortune derives from colonial exploitation of India. There, she meets an effacing, solicitous dreamboat-scion, Gerard (James Wagner), an accountant by trade who prefers the natural peace of removing himself from life’s engagement (by choice rather than necessity).
Gerard’s uncle, the Professor (Leonard Kelly-Young), may be a pompous and defensively contemptuous relic of imperialism, but he is also a perceptive scholar with a keen memory and lofty standards. His recollections of her haplessly clueless and compromised Bapu devastate her, yet paradoxically enable her to free herself (perhaps) of her disabling resentments so inextricable from her heritage’s subjugated history.
A deeply political play that prefers to suggest that its ideas are more subliminal than analytical, Shiv totes its heavy baggage with a doggedly gossamer touch, incarnated not merely by Jolly’s gamine pluck and her own distinctively transparent command of empathy that bespeaks star quality, but also the resourceful invention of Emilie Beck’s direction.
Beck lends the piece a determined sense of play that shrewdly synthesizes the profuse patterns of images and metaphors into a delightful series of highly concrete props that drop from above the stage on wires: This defines the claustrophobia of Shiv’s condition while opening it up to the possibility of endless invention, realizing internally her own kinship with her father’s failed dream of creating new forms for a new post-colonial culture.
Complementing the effective work of properties designer Erin Walley and scenic designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, sound designer Jack Arky positively luxuriates in the supple potential of Boston Court’s nonpareil sound system.
What appears in outline to be a most conventional play turns out to be an ambitious one that gets under the skin with its charms. Its gracious surfaces disguise a common unease expressed in highly specific cultural terms. This may be a rationalizing projection on my part, but for all the play’s rather modest pleasures, I unconsciously identified sufficiently deeply with Bapu’s creative block and Shiv’s inability to leave the house. Though this review was written well after the viewing, I felt I couldn’t go anywhere until it was done — even though, like them, I knew just what I felt needed to be said.
The Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Avenue, Pasadena; through August 9. www.bostoncourt.com
