Poochu's Productions presents "I Hate This (A True Story)"

Karthik TMK

One month ago, Poochu’s Productions produced my play, I Hate This (A True Story), at the Alliance Française de Madras in Chennai, India. Directed by Denver Anthony Nicholas and performed by Karthik TMK (and also by Abinaya R, more on her in a moment) this was not the first time these two men have presented this play about my experiences with stillbirth.

Four years ago, Denver, Karthik and I had a few email conversations about their producing the play in Spring 2021. They asked for a number of perfectly reasonable changes. The production would be performed in English (once referred to as India’s "subsidiary official language") and take place in America, but there were certain passages which would not be understood, culturally. Also, some of the names were unusual – a woman named Toni, for example – and could those be changed.

Most significantly, in my opinion, they asked if the several characters who I would traditionally have performed myself be performed instead by another performer, a woman. When we adapted the play into an audio drama in 2005 – was that really twenty years ago? I digress – I felt it would be easier to understand if every character had their own voice. But I always thought of it as strictly a solo performance.

Abinaya R

But that’s me. Theater is nothing if not an expansive art form. I was intrigued. And why not? They know best how to present this play to their audience, and I don’t. For this most recent production they cast Abinaya R, with whom they had most recently worked with in a production of Doubt by John Patrick Shanley.

Part of the design concept for this production of I Hate This was to emphasize the idea that while Karthik is telling the story now, today, Abinaya represents the past. He wears colors, she is monochromatic, dressed in black, her face and hands made white and gray. He looks at her, she never sees him. I was struck by this upon her first reveal, as the mother on the phone. She appears in a pool of light, far upstage. She looks so small compared to him in that scene, almost as though she is in a thought bubble.

When Denver and Karthik first produced this work, I was asked if they could change the title. This title, I HATE THIS, is the original sin of this particular work, as far back as 2002 it was suggested to me that the phrase might present a barrier to attendance. I took the risk. They were right, but I do not regret my decision. The show needs a content advisory and I believe the title serves that purpose.

Karthik TMK

As they strove to return to live performance following the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Denver felt that the original title would alienate audiences, and we agreed upon the much more digestible title What Happened. In the play that is asked as a question, as presented here it is simply a statement. This is what happened. For this new production, they decided it was now acceptable to use the original title, with the subtitle "a true story."

I have my own reasons for having written this piece, and why I keep returning to it. I am grateful to Playhouse Square and University Hospitals for producing the film (starring James Alexander Rankin) which continues to be used as an educational tool and an instrument of comfort for the bereaved. However, those few times (so far) that companies or individuals have inquired about producing the piece independently, I am always deeply curious as to their interest, or intentions.

Abinaya R

For Karthik, it is the opportunity to play something dramatic. Most solo performances for men are comic (I have heard this before, even from high school students seeking something different to perform for competitions) and he was looking for something which would allow him to be vulnerable on stage, and tell a story that would move people.

Denver told me about the first performances of What Happened/I Hate This, four years ago, when a young woman who saw the show was inconsolable and sobbing following the performance. A few years later, Denver’s company was holding one of their monthly Enter Stage events, a kind of open mic for artists to perform their own monologues. A young woman told a powerful and personal story of having suffered a miscarriage. When she was asked about this after her presentation, she said that it was her who had been so emotionally overwhelmed by my play, because of her own loss – and that the experience had inspired her to tell her story on stage, something she may not have done otherwise.

Director Denver Anthony Nicholas (center)
with Karthik and Abinaya

I have written several plays which have been published, rights for production handled by others without my participation. There’s a production of Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street next weekend in Louisiana. It's going to be dinner theater and if the photos are any indication, I would love to get there for the food alone. I Hate This is not currently published, so there have been far fewer independent productions.

But when they come, when artists have found the script and reach to inquire about production, it means that our story, mine and my wife’s story of how we incorporated loss into our lives, that it is being told to an entirely new audience. And the fact that that story might have an impact on someone who lives and loves and grieves on the other side of the earth, that is truly remarkable.

Sources: 

Notification No. 2/8/60-O.L, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, April 27, 1960

"What’s in a monologue? Enter stage & find out" by Rupam Jain, Indian Express Indulge, August 18, 2023

Play a Day: Paper Cranes

Kari Bentley-Quinn

For Sunday, I read Paper Cranes by Kari Bentley-Quinn and posted at New Play Exchange.

Okay, so. First things, first. I have been asked to consider a new title for my monodrama I Hate This (a play without the baby) for performance in another country. The request was sincere, and respectful, and included a good argument for making the change in this case.

Also, yesterday I spent the afternoon rooting about in my mother's attic, appraising personal effects, making notres of the things that she had stored for someone to eventually make a decision about (not her.)

Now I am reading a play about love and mourning and I am finding it all a bit too much to take. Still, good play.

"Everyone's always infecting someone with something."

This is such a warm and tender play, full of grief and longing. I was once told I wrte plays about "decent people" and I am still not sure if that was a compliment or a criticism. So many stories are people with awful, deceitful characters, people I don't want to spend two hours with, or five minutes.

Okay, sometimes. But not usually. And they don't touch me at all.

Bentley-Quinn has crafted a sextet of inter-twined relationships and in anothers' hands they would all meet in a big, explosive, shocking reveal but surprisingly, they do not. And that was the right choice because this story of grief and loss deserved to remain at the center of the plot and not become the subject of emotional porn.

Sorry, I hate describing what this play isn't when what I meant to say is how enamored I am of what it is. A testament to the paths of grief and and th inevitability of change, and the hope that we can understand and survive the needto move forward into an uncertain future.

Who should I read tomorrow?

My mother's hands.

These hands are not more like.- HAM I.ii

I have my mother’s hands. Long, thin fingers, veins close to the surface, standing out like bluish vines beneath the skin.

When I was a child, I was fascinated by these veins, standing out like inverted rivers on a relief map. I would poke at them to see how would divert beneath my touch. “Stop that,” she would say. My own children have done the same to my hands, and I say, "Stop that.”

Her final days, her hands could not be more different from each other. Her right hand, which had stopped obeying commands from her brain a month ago, lay still, devoid of muscular connection or attention. It was a soft and flat. skin rounded and smooth, like glass. Useless.

Her left still lived, wiry, boney. Her face had gone slack, emaciated, her left hand our best indicator of how she felt. She would raise her left arm, hand outstretched, to say, “I’m here. You’re here. We are together.” She would reach, grasp for attention. To hold hands. To say hello.

Or so we thought. Perhaps she was visioning, greeting those she thought she was seeing. We cannot know.

She would also clench her left fist, her arm in a stiff left angle. We took this to mean she was in pain, and we would provide medication. I like to think we were easing her suffering, and not merely depriving her of communication. She spoke with her left hand.

My mother died last night. She was washed and dressed, her cold hands placed across each other. They were alike again, and just like mine.

Play a Day: Joan's Arc

Emily Hageman

For Thursday I read Joan's Arc by Emily Hageman and available at New Play Exchange.

"Even strong people need help," Mason tells his best friend Joan in this touching, gripping high school drama, a teen caper set against the background of a school shooting.

Speaking personally, at my age, it is hard to make that leap. The plot is not about the shooting, the real mystery is about manipulating test scores, which is also an argument modern dilemma.

The fact that a school shooting is a thing that happened, like it could have happened anywhere, that is what is truly disturbing because that is true. That is normal.

My daughter attends high school. She has suffered the loss of a friend from a self-inflicted gunshot. And so did I, when I was in high school. A suicide is not a "shooter," but they do have elements in common. The guns. The loss. The injury to a community.

Hageman does a masterful job creating teenage speak. Teenagers and young adults are so fluid with their language, before they are forced to conform to a unified vernacular, to appear respectful, or adult. To have a job. To stop having to put up with the snide comments from their elders.

They crack and comment and make each other laugh, but they also obfuscate and deflect and defend. Language is common denominator, and a shield. This is evident as the main character, Joan, sets her self apart from her peers by speaking in complete sentences, By her directness. Even that is a form of defense.

Ultimately, this is a story of finding your people. And we all need to find our people.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Familium Vulgare

Melisa Tien

For Monday I read Familium Vulgare by Melisa Tien and available at New Play Exchange.

This past weekend, my wife and I attended a beautiful French Quarter wedding in NOLA for some Millennial aged artist friends, Melissa and Patrick.

I have mentioned Missy a number of times in this blog, she directed the reading of The Way I Danced With You at Playwrights Local. The service was conducted by Chennelle, another person who followers of the blog will be familiar with.

The ceremony itself was held in Preservation Hall, and afterward as we were comparing notes my wife and I both observed that this was the first time we had been witness to a marriage ceremony where we saw ourselves in the shoes of the parents, and not those of the young people involved.

So it was this morning as I began reading Familium Vulgare (translation: common family) which describes a Chinese-American family, the tragic and fatal allergic reaction the mother suffers from a bee sting, and the immediate fallout among the other members of the nuclear family - father, son and daughter.

The father is described as in his 50s, and so it is with me. When I was at school someone said you know you have matured as an actor when you can read a play without automatically casting yourself as the lead character. That’s as may be, sounds like just some more bullshit theater advice, regardless, may I suggest true maturity as a writer is creating a play in which everyone is the main character, no individual personality is more or less significant than the others.

And yet, to me, today, the father striving to cope with grief through his Buddhist philosophy is the main character. Your opinions may vary.

What Tien so movingly captures is the manner in which different folks struggle to manage the earth moving devastation of a recent loss; the father by clearing the decks, the son by visiting an revisiting recorded memories of the past, and the daughter through a psychic connection with the very creatures who brought death to her mother.

Who should I read tomorrow?