‘Joy’ in visuals — but plot is unfortunately predictable
“House of Joy” wants to be about doing the right thing. It wants to be about a dilemma in the life of a palace bodyguard during India’s Mughal Empire. Will the sterling Hamida (Emma Van Lare) adhere strictly to her superiors’ orders? Or will she bend the rules to help the chief queen, Maryam (Rinabeth Apostol), escape the emperor’s abuse?
Trouble is, there’s not much doubting, or even considering, in Madhuri Shekar’s play, whose world premiere opened Saturday, Aug. 17, at California Shakespeare Theater. Hamida begins the show with a fatally compassionate nature, and she stays that way. Her scene partners all declare early on where they stand on the goodbad spectrum, ranging from a sympathetic fellow guard in Roshni (Sango Tajima) to an ambitious but thwarted princess in Noorah (Lipica Shah). Few of the others are quite so ready as Hamida is to risk their jobs or lives for a harem queen whose every whim for garments or jewels gets indulged, but they all have glimmers of compunction that need only a shared sense of oppression to kindle into open resistance.
“House of Joy” is an earnest, wellintentioned but careful play, one that bran
dishes its righteous ideals, one that seeks to model how to behave. But it situates that didactic project in a milieu that hasn’t been explored much on Western stages: the almost allfemale world of an Indian harem where, despite imprisonment, women could achieve some manner of power and skill — acting in lieu of the emperor, becoming warriors.
So complete was the sequestration of women of the Mughal court that only female bodyguards, or Urdubegis, could protect inhabitants. Highly skilled fighters and martial artists, they were often enslaved foreigners trained for their profession from early childhood, which is why they weren’t subject to the same rules about covering and cloistering as other women in court.
Director Megan SandbergZakian sculpts the guards’ world with striking visual choices. WenLing Liao’s lighting dazzles with coral pinks and cobalt blues. Fight director Dave Maier develops a unique physical language for performers’ sparring — the miming of pinching, then drawing, then releasing the string of a bow and arrow; punches deployed with laser focus on a target; long bamboo sticks used partly like sabers, partly like much blunter objects.
Oana Botez’s costume design is a master class in how to honor specifics of time and place without being hemmed in by them. Her ensembles for Roshni, Hamida and their commander, Gulal (Nandita Shenoy), glitter like freshly fallen snow in moonlight. Layers of epaulets swell like the shells of the Sydney Opera House. Layers of skirts, open in the middle, suggest muscle rather than frills. The guards are powerful without looking masculine, feminine without looking dainty. It’s a way to make an argument and imagine a different world, a different past and future, through clothing.
SandbergZakian’s cast amplifies the muted assignments as much as they can. As the harem’s eunuch, Salima, Rotimi Agbabiaka flourishes gold talons and gold eyelashes as fiercely and precisely as the guards do their weapons. As Thermometer, a doctor and Hamida’s love interest, Raji Ahsan mixes puppydog vulnerability and understated selfpossession — a combination of boyishness and manliness that would make him a stellar leading man in a Hollywood romcom.
Watch Shah’s Noorah as she finally gets a taste of the power she’s long craved, that she’s always known she could wield more effectively and efficiently than her inept father ever has. She breathes in as if to fuel herself on the changing atmosphere, as if to feel it expand her lungs and course through her veins. It’s as heady as a drug, but she can handle it, mastering it and herself.
There was never mystery in whether she’ll succeed, though. Like everything else in “House of Joy,” her triumph over obstacles is a foregone conclusion.