Nophand Boonyai's work always excites audiences with the various ways it throws out the rules and conventions of theatre. Last year, he brought together art therapists and actors in Therapy (After The Flood), where we got to see the therapists treat the characters created by the performers. Each unscripted show was a progression from the previous show, like actual therapy sessions.
Parnrut Kritchanchai, Pahparn Sirima and Panchana Soonthornpipit in Adoption .
His latest production Adoption is another mostly non-scripted show, in which the performers play contestants in a game show competing to win the adoption of a child.
The performance begins with a video recording of a young Isan woman (Tanyarat Pradittan), explaining why she gave up her child for adoption while breezily nibbling on a mango. We then see couples looking to adopt the child being interviewed and recorded on camera. Sometimes they are interviewed individually, sometimes as a couple.
We later find out that they are all part of a game show called Adoption, and the interviewers are co-hosts (Krisana Panpeng and Sirima Chaipreechavit), not professionals in an adoption agency. The final part of the show sees the couples pitted against each other in a game show format, answering questions and playing games mostly irrelevant to the child, the child's background, parenting, and adoption.
Nophand and the performers have created three distinct types of couple: the conservative and religious (Parnrut Kritchanchai and Dulthas Wasinajindakaew), the young and liberal (Pahparn Sirima and Lapin Laosoontorn), and the glamorous gay couple (Panchana Soonthornpipit and Wasurachata Unaprom).
While the improvisation and the structure of Adoption help to peel the layers of these characters little by little in the first part, none of them end up moving beyond the frames of the archetypes already drawn for them. We never get to hear what the characters think about parenting, but get to see more about who they are as people and as couples.
After the interview sessions, the show quickly devolves into a mere series of improvisation exercises and games. At this point, the subjects of parenting and adoption the show intends to tackle seem trivial matters, and the more important task for the performers is to present the extremes of the archetypes they're playing.
To decide which couple is to take home the child, three audience members are invited to discuss and choose the winner. The winner reacts like they've just won a shopping spree, and the losers act like they've lost some prize they didn't know why they were fight for to begin with. And it seems natural that the performers react that way: Adoption doesn't seem to be very interested in exploring the process and the politics of adoption and parenting, or even their emotional and psychological implications in the first place.
The interviews (which in some ways resemble police interrogations) and game show are not used in ways that reflect anything about the subjects Nophand touches upon. The director/writer may have decided to use these formats to place the performers under the personal and social pressure aspiring parents experience when going through the process of adopting a child, but it only ends up demonstrating that the characters equate adopting a child to winning a material prize, which I think is a much more cynical worldview than Nophand intends his show to project.
In Adoption, Nophand makes us see not the wider possibility of improvisation but rather its limitations, as well as his failure to recognise its constraints and to exercise more control over his work.
Despite Adoption's conceptual weakness, it is deliciously entertaining. Go see it for great individual and ensemble performances, and impressive improvisation work, but don't expect much substance. Adoption is playing at Democrazy Studio (MRT Lumpini exit No.1) from Thursdays to Mondays, with the last performance on March 16. Show time is 8pm and tickets cost 400 and 450 baht. Call 089-126-7112.
