In cities where mistrust and suspicion are considered to be wise precautions, public spaces like parks, make it possible to familiarize unfamiliar faces. Sometimes they even enable dialogue among unfamiliar people. The theatre production “Park”, which was performed at IIHS and Atta Galata over the weekend, draws on a similar idea. Written by Manav Kaul and directed by Nimi Ravindran, the play stages an episode of public encounter between three strangers who visit a park to gain some moments of solitude. They are forced to confront each other when a desirable spot on the park bench becomes a point of conflict. Drawing the audience towards the story, the play starts as a humorous quarrel between a drunk father, a frustrated male youth and an elderly local man. Though humour in the beginning is dense, one can hear laughter from the audience punctuating performance every now and then till the end. However, the play assumes intellectual proportions of debate and dialogue when the three characters begin drawing on historical and political analogies to justify their right over the spot on the bench. In the process of it’s escalation the questions of identity, ownership, territory and belongingness are interrogated from different perspectives.
The play is basic in terms of its setting, plot, sound and light. From a distance one can identify a clear conflict, climax and denouement in the plot but in the experience of sitting through the play itself one feels that it has far too many loose ends. In their own personal stories as well as in the general arguments they put forward to make their case for the most desirable spot. One instance of such a disconnect is when the young man begins to confess to the older one that he has some “mental disorder”, that he thinks he is a genius. But without a deeper engagement with story of his life, this socially sensitive issue sticks out as an awkward mention in the story. Similarly, the political metaphors of Kashmir and Palestine were left to remain as underdeveloped analogies. Therefore, what could have become a fully absorbing experience, falls short of being so.
Apart from this, the play makes evident different aspects of interacting with people in public spaces such as the fundamental tension between desire to be left alone and desire to engage and the tension between one’s desire to be anonymous and desire to be known by the other. What stands out for the audience however is the realization that while the characters use the political scenarios as metaphors for making their own scenario cognizant to each other, the park and the dispute over the spot itself inversely becomes the larger metaphor for the socio-political disputes over land and territory.
