Crowded cast in haphazard history lesson
You can’t fault the goals behind En-Acte Arts and Noorani Dance’s “The Parting.” Written by Salil Singh with Anurag Wadehra and directed by Singh, it seeks to dive deep into the history of the 1947 Partition of India, chronicling misguided law by misguided law, zeroing in on individual stories in an event that upended the lives of millions and whose long shadow has colored the lives of still many more.
Nor can you fault the ambition of the piece, which opened Friday, Jan. 19, at Z Space for a three-day run before heading to San Jose’s Hammer Theatre in March. Singh employs 22
actors, 18 dancers and a violinist (Raaginder Singh Momi) who’s composed an original score. The myriad stories they tell over 2½ hours endeavor to give the show epic scope, to weave from each specific thread of human cost a whole tapestry of catastrophe.
Yet despite a few promising exceptions, “The Parting” still needs a lot of work. Too often characters straight-up tell you their emotions — “I’ve begun to feel quite hopeless” — instead of showing them to you and letting you make your own inferences. Acting is similarly declamatory and amateurish, with some enunciation so garbled whole lines get lost.
Singh tells so many stories that few accrete emotional heft. Most of his characters are stock: the inquisitive young girl who conveniently wants to hear this whole history; the unfeeling, rubberstamping bureaucrats who banish families from their homes, render citizens stateless and separate spouses; the neighbors of different religions who should have trusted each other all along, a sentiment that even gets a pat lesson spelled out: Standing up for someone and protecting his home are “what friends and neighbors do for each other.”
If it can be thrilling to see so many humans on a single stage, especially because characters range in age from tiny children to grandparents, Singh often arranges them clumsily, groups clumping together or drifting in as if they weren’t exactly sure of their stage directions. Battle scenes are particularly haphazard, looking as if performers had been told only to yell, run and flail, without grounding that instruction in the particulars of character and circumstance.
Throughout, moments of thoughtful artistry periodically animate the proceedings, as when a Muslim wife’s (Farah Yasmeen Shaikh) skittish, anxious dance, all flicks of the arm as if to brush the past off herself, belies the severe verbal testimony she gives — or is forced to give — about her Sikh husband (Chanpreet Singh). Or pretty much whenever a parade of kathak dancers files on, the ghungroos (feet bells) around their ankles percussing to conjure the huffs and puffs of a locomotive or the passage of time.
Still, especially in the second act, as performers repeatedly narrate how many months have passed, the show drags. It’s a history lesson you want to pay attention to, with its larger points about the folly of borders, the arbitrariness of nation defining, the inhumanity of trying to make individuals fit into bureaucratic check boxes, all of which arise from the still older crimes of colonialism and racism. But the “The Parting” is still just that — a history lesson instead of theater.