Last year, Crescent Moon Theatre's Project 1/4 gathered four directors together to direct four short plays written by Orada Lelanuja. Each of the plays featured two characters who speak to the audience and not to each other, each telling their own side of the story, never looking at one another a wide emotional gap between them. They eventually find a way towards each other, closing that gap.
Criss-crossing shadows and lives in the play In The Grey Room.
Orada's characters are faint sketches of people. Like poems, her plays are driven by rhythmic, short bursts of words, not by the traditional dialogue. Her characters don't argue; they speak of disagreements and plainly detail their discontentment. I was always harbouring a hope that she would soon do a dialogue-driven play in which characters speak to one another. As abstract as her plays can get and as much as it allows ample room for interpretation, especially to directors, to me, they have their own frustrating limits.
Her latest creation In The Grey Room was first written in dialogue form and in English. Its final incarnation in Thai is unfortunately more of the same as before, except longer than usual.
Two men (Athapol Anantavorasakul and Saifah Tanthana) and a woman (Orada) are enmeshed in a love triangle falling in love with each other, becoming intolerable to each other, falling out of love, trying to forget one another, falling back in love, parting, getting married, cheating, leaving one another, meeting again and reconciling.
Director Sukanya Piansri contains their incestuous entanglement within a small grey room. Her visual choices are bold and seem to be strongly influenced by Anne Bogart's Viewpoints technique, which designs the relationship between the body and the space. And the production is visually arresting, with diagonal lines sharply criss-crossing the floor, a large, grey, hefty table, and three grey chairs, which are beautifully employed to express distance between characters and underline and sharpen emotions. Lighting design by Tawit Keitprapai gives the space an airy and sweet quality. While the characters are trapped in the same romantic circle over time, the small space feels more like a series of blank pages, one possibility, one beginning after another.
I've always appreciated Orada's poetry, lyricism, and her insistence on breaking the traditional dialogue mould. She has yet to break her own formulaic structure, dive deeper into her characters' turmoil, and make us experience their human complexities. The characters in In The Grey Room are more like vessels of words than real people with real problems. Each phase in their lives and romance move swiftly and is given little weight, and I never get to see their inner evolution, making it difficult for me to empathise or feel connected to any of them.
What's most interesting about the production is how difficult it can be to separate the director and the playwright's touches. This type of collaborative relationship and process for original plays between the director and the playwright is still rare in Thailand, but it's starting, especially since Orada has entered the Bangkok theatre scene. And in just a couple of years, she has helped start a movement that has yielded many new plays and several more playwrights. And it still has a long, long way to go.
- In The Grey Room: Feb 6-9 at 7.30pm at Crescent Moon Space, Pridi Banomyong Institute.
- Tickets cost 400 baht (350 baht for students).
- Call 081-929-4246 or 083-123-6331.
