No guard against banality
If you were to reverse-engineer “Guards at the Taj,” Rajiv Joseph’s play now in its Bay Area premiere at Marin Theatre Company, you can see why the show seemed like a great idea.
It has just two characters and runs just 85 minutes, which makes it candy for producers. In centering on imperial guards Humayun ( Jason Kapoor) and Babur (Rushi Kota), who are stationed outside the newly constructed Taj Mahal in 1648, it brings to our stages a time and place that don’t get nearly enough attention from American theater. Its noble purpose is to make individual and immediate a class of people rendered only in broad strokes in our history books.
A grand metaphor or two?
Check. An ending that doesn’t tie up every loose end? Check. A comic double act, with a straight man who’s bound by rules and order, versus a clown who constantly foils him? Check. Philosophical discussions that range from aesthetics to great moral dilemmas, rendered colloquially, with equal parts humor and solemnity? You got it.
Unfortunately, Marin Theatre Company’s production, seen Thursday, May 4, never becomes more than checklist. Directed by Jasson Minadakis, the show follows a pragmatic formula for success in contemporary theater but commits cardinal sins. It lacks credibility, originality and heart.
Let’s start with credibility. Even if you weren’t familiar with the bloody myths surrounding the marvel’s construction — its commissioner, Shah Jahan, supposedly had various architects and builders killed or gruesomely injured — Marin Theatre Company hints at the show’s gore by offering ponchos to audience members seated in the theater’s small “splash zone.” Expect no torrents, just maybe a few incidental droplets. In any case, no poncho can protect you from the show’s spoton visuals, particularly props designer Lizabeth Stanley’s nauseatingly specific evocation of bits of the human anatomy.
Yet as Humayun and Babur reckon with slaughter, their dialogue is so cavalier, so banal, as to deflate the show’s whole premise. They’re clearly supposed to be in denial, coping as best they can with the unthinkable, but Kapoor and Kota give no weight or charge to their meandering discussion of Humayun’s idea for a fanciful invention, a “transportable hole.” The pair might as well be shooting the breeze, just as they were in the play’s exposition-laden first scene. It’s the sort of choice that seems calculated to be offbeat or edgy but winds up feeling cold.
If you’ve seen “The Odd Couple,” you can already predict exactly how the friendship between dogmatic Humayun and mischievous Babur will evolve. At one point, Joseph almost gives the dynamic his own shading, hinting that Humayun’s severity derives in part from jealousy of Babur’s creativity (his invention ideas are better), his spirit of adventure. That notion never develops, though, and soon we’re back to the same old shtick from one-dimensional characters.
Kota has one stunning moment, when Babur says that beauty “matters to me.” It’s a display of both vulnerability and passion, and it clearly delineates what the show tries to put at stake: how much are we willing to pay for wonders of the world, or simply for a good life, security? But when Babur and Humayun start talking seriously about how they’ve “killed beauty,” you can’t help but roll your eyes. With dialogue that stilted and pretentious, what actually gets killed is the scene.