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Looking back at life
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`Breathe In Breathe Out', a play based on Edward Albee's `Three Tall Women' staged at Taj Krishna, kept the audience engrossed with its engaging verbal sniping. The two-act play, directed by Lillete Dubey went through a single life story many times over. SUMANASPATI reports.
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Photos: P.V. Sivakumar
MEMORY LANE: Representing different stages of life. — Photos: P.V. Sivakumar
A (weeping): "I've shrunk! I'm not tall! I used to be so tall! Why have I shrunk?
B: It happens with time: we get shorter. It happens every day, too: we're taller in the morning than we are at night.
A: How?
B: The spine compresses as the day goes on.
A: (eve weepier) I don't have one. I used to have a spine; I don't have anymore!
C: What does she mean?
B: She means osteoporosis.
A: (To C; ugly; weeping down to snivelling) It hasn't happened to you yet! You wait!"
* * * * * * *
IMAGINE THREE `tall' women in conversation: A, B and C respectively for convenience. One, a 92-year rich, old, sick woman, senile, cantankerous and struggling with conflicting memories, and a broken hand and damaged spine; the second one, her 52-year old caretaker, good humoured, condescending but actually quite disillusioned and bitter; and a 26-year old charming lawyer but a `baby', still dreamy-eyed, mercilessly insistent about small details, romantic about relationships and life's worth.
VERBAL SNIPES: The stagecraft was of the highest order.
But what if they are the same person, talking to one another?
Edward Albee's 1994 Pulitzer prize winning play (his third) Three Tall Women employs this novel stratagem to dish out a remarkable exposition of the problem of understanding a life that is one's own. Albee is the most known by that landmark play in American drama, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Tennessee Williams called Albee: "the only great playwright we've ever had in America." Inspired by the life and personality of Albee's cantankerous adoptive mother, the two-act play runs you through a single life story many times over.
In the first act, the old woman tries to remember rather unsuccessfully the shining moments of her life: her beauty, her control-freak of a mother, the prim upbringing, horse races, dance parties, ornaments, steamy affairs, a scene of frustrating sex, the tough job of managing a family and its wealth, and an undefined him - father, an unfaithful husband, lover, an estranged son?
The other two women listen, comment, grimace, smile sarcastically. The old woman has to be carried to the loo repeatedly.
At the end of the act, no more able to sustain the mental struggle (I can't remember. I can't remember what I can't) and the need to believe that she has been efficient and strong, she has a stroke and collapses.
Act two. The old woman is on a bed with a mask on her face. And you have the three women, now explicitly representing the woman at three different stages of her life. The youngest is determined to never be like the other two. This refusal to accept the future sets in a string of soliloquies of the ups and downs of each moment in life.
And the young woman sees in the others what she will become, what she will know, what she doesn't want to know. Sex, courtship, virginity, erections, sex. "I will not become either of you." "You'll learn," the oldest tall woman tells her.
The middle-aged woman has a confident sense of maturity and hard-earned tranquillity.
"What I like most about being where I am is that there's a lot I don't have to go through anymore? Standing up here right on top of the middle of it has to be the happiest time. I mean, it's the only time you get a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view - see in all directions. Wow! What a view!"
But through the old woman she sees what she will eventually turn out to be: widowhood, dirty deaths, betrayal. Unforgiving, beyond forgiving. Illness and death.
LADDER OF LIFE: Lillete Dubey's performance was energetic and effective.
"You're both such children. The happiest moment of it all? Really? The Happiest moment? ?.. coming to the end of it, yes. So. There it is. You asked after all. That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop.
When we can stop." This kind of a summary though can't do justice to the very engaging verbal sniping you find in the play.
Albee's comeback play keeps you enthralled for two hours.
Lillete Dubey, the director had two other highly popular and competent Bombay actresses donning the roles in the play - Shernaz Patel and Suchitra Pillay.
The 33rd performance of the play (retitled Breathe In Breathe Out at Taj Krishna banquet hall received tremendous applause from the audience.
As could be expected from Dubey's Primetime Theatre Company, the stagecraft, the lighting and sound, not to mention the acting were of very high standards.
Shernaz Patel, in particular, brought a great subtlety to a rather difficult role.
"The play is pretty bleak, especially in the first act. In my production, I tried to work against the grain of the text by making it more punchy and sparkling. I trust the audiences enjoy it," said Lillete, when asked about her interpretation.
For the second act, she adopted a rather pleasant setting with two shiny metal swings on both ends of the stage and a lot of choreographed moments that takes away much of the drab atmosphere indicated in the script.
Her own portrayal of the 92-year-old woman is remarkably energetic and piercingly effective. So if you want to have the experience of meeting yourself 30 years hence and 60 years hence, and still not feel shattered, this would be the play for you.As Albee himself noted, art does redeem the ugliness of life along with its beauty: "Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last twenty years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I <15,0m,,0>done?"
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