Unlikely Pen Pals:
Feroz Abbas Khan’s work in theatre has been unpredictable. He has done the very minimalistic Tumhari Amrita, and the spectacular Mughal-e-Azam and The Great Indian Musical: Civilisation To Nation. His return to words over style was almost inevitable, and it does not come as a complete surprise that he has chosen US-based playwright Rajiv Joseph’s epistolatory work, Letters Of Suresh, a companion piece of sorts to an earlier play Animals Out Of Paper— the character of Suresh and origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into artistic shapes, being the common factors.
Letters Of Suresh is a strange play both in content and form—using the now almost extinct practice of letter writing and dependence on the postal system (jocularly called snail mail) to tell the stories of four people, who never meet on stage, except for one Facetime conversation. The four actors perform monologues, with those enigmatic letters as the focus. They are all troubled in their own ways, and the letters enable them to forge improbable connections.
Melody Park (Palomi Ghosh), an American woman of Japanese-Korean origin. She is informed of the death of an uncle she did not even know she had, and goes to Nagasaki for the funeral of Father Hashimoto (Harssh Singh). He had no personal belongings except an origami bird and a box of letters from someone called Suresh Thakur, in the US. Melody wants to send the letters to Suresh, but first writes to him to confirm the address. These days, it is not so difficult to find someone, usually an internet search suffices, but Melody an aspiring writer, is so taken by the act of writing a letter, that she continues to write to him, even when she gets no reply from Suresh, and through her letters one gets to know about her life.
Suresh (Vir Hirani), a techie and origami wiz, had had a brief encounter with Father Hashimoto when he went to Nagasaki to attend an origami event. For reasons that become clear later, there was a reason for the priest to write to Suresh, and for him to respond. They become unlikely pen pals, in spite of differences in age, background, culture and spiritual choices. Father Hashimoto believes in prayer and Suresh vehemently opposed to anything religious, which gives the play some moments of humour.
The fourth character is Amelia (Radhika Sawhney), which whom Suresh has an affair, and she unwittingly becomes a catalyst in the story, the circle of which is completed when the priest’s last unsent letter is discovered by Suresh when he travels to Japan on learning of the priest’s death.
Joseph’s jigsaw-like play leaves the audience to figure out the little nuances—why the origami bird Suresh folded means so much to the priest. The mention of Nagasaki immediately brings to mind the American bombing of the city (after Hiroshima) during WW-II and Suresh has another tangential connection with Father Hashimoto, that comes through via his letter.
With a few pieces of wooden furniture as props, a bit of fancy lighting and unobtrusive music, Khan stages the play with simplicity, leaving the viewer to read between the lines, or rather, imagine between the monologues. Vir Hirani has the most time on stage, and the newbie actor is not short on confidence or clarity. Harssh Singh brings to the play the gentle gravity one expected of the man of God, who has experienced and understood suffering. Very indirectly, Letters Of Suresh makes an anti-war statement. It would be unfair to expect the emotional or romantic depth of the letters in Tumhari Amrita – that was set in another time, another place. Letters Of Sureshis set in today’s times for the generation that was born or grew up in the twenty-first century. They are the ones who need to acquire the patience that paper, pen and the postal system require.
(This piece first appeared in mumbaitheatreguide.com)