The historical made personal

We don't know where they are -- a man and a woman, he in a white three-piece suit, she in a white wedding gown. Soon we find out that they don't know where they are either. Then we find out who they are, but soon realise they are not sure.

Pradit Prasartthong's latest play, Tee Mai Mee Tee (A Nowhere Place), is another of the artist's tributes to the memories of the Oct 6 Thammasat University massacre 40 years ago. Pradit, a playwright, director and actor, is better known for his retelling of Thai classic and folk tales through modernised musical-theatre forms. In the past five years, his works have come to centre on Thai-style musicals that tell the lives of democratic icons like writer Kulap Saipradit (Sri Burapha), Pridi Banomyong's wife Poonsuk Banomyong and, most recently, Puey Ungphakorn in Mangkorn Slad Gled (Dragon's Heart).

Pradit has a gift for music, and a gift for lyrics, for words. And even though A Nowhere Place is a straight play, there's poetry in it. But like in Thai folk-musical theatre, poetry lives alongside colloquialism and ribald humour. The poetry here, though, does not exist in rhymes or witty wordplay, but in the delicacy with which Pradit handles the subject of remembering and forgetting.

Pradit Prasartthong. photo: photographer

At first, the man (Pradit) and the woman (Duangjai Hiransri) come off as humorous figures -- two forgetful, bordering on ignorant, strangers reconstructing their lives. They confuse pigeons with a crane and dove (Thais use the word nok pirab for both dove and pigeon); they confuse Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window and Shizuka of Japanese manga Doraemon with Sadako Sasaki and her thousand paper cranes. But still we follow them, the two unreliable narrators, as they trade the details of their lives, from their marriages, her best friend and his child to that day on a lawn full of students, police and soldiers.

Pradit does not leave the audience in the dark, the way his characters are left to navigate their traumas. We read about Sadako and her sickness, about pigeons and their diseases, about schizophrenia, Alzheimer's and electroshock treatment in clinical paragraphs projected onto the wall.

A Nowhere Place is a bold departure from Pradit's usual aesthetic and fictionalised narratives of noble and revered political figures. But as always, he never pushes music to the side. And here, he gently scores the play with live piano playing of songs written by the "songs for life" bands of the 1970s generation, like Karmachon and Caravan.

But beyond the aesthetic achievement, it is the first artistic work I've seen on the Oct 6 massacre that equates the event and the country's subsequent dealing with it as a kind of trauma. A Nowhere Place, then, is about the impact of suppressed traumas on our psyche and identity. It's also a theatrical creation that reconstructs parts of the event through spoken words more than images. At one point in the play, the performers take turns playing a psychiatrist, asking what each character remembers about the event.

We have seen numerous disturbing images of the massacre, chiefly the ones by American photographer Neal Ulevich, which are easily found on the internet. Yet we know so little of those who survived. A Nowhere Place shows us that there is little to no place in Thailand to voice the more personal accounts of the event.

Pradit's "nowhere place" is also a space where both sides of the conflict meet to try to remember and reconstruct an event that has defined their lives. The way the playwright and director portrays the male character reminds me of his treatment of the same massacre in Dragon's Heart. Among other theatre artists, Pradit's handling of the Oct 6 massacre has always stood out to me for the way it sees the people involved in the event beyond the labels of victims and perpetrators. A stance that takes into account the humanity of all involved and still does not excuse the heinous acts committed against fellow humans is always a more courageous stance.

Those of us who do not belong to the same generation as the characters may see them as removed from us. During the play, we laugh because they confuse cultural icons, bird names and historical events, and because the woman's best friend has an embarrassingly outdated nickname. It's funny because they seem ignorant, old and forgetful.

But in the telling of such a poignant and tragic story, the parts where the playwright wants to elicit laughter from the audience can be revealing. We laugh at others when they err or do something we think beneath us. More rarely, we laugh when we recognise ourselves and our own follies in others.

But are the two characters any more ignorant than us? Do we, 40 years later and still under a similar regime of forgetfulness, know more about the Oct 6 massacre than they have managed to remember and piece together? Or are we just like them, individuals as much as a collective identity, who only know faintly how we all have come to be here?