Also this issue:

Not Your Average Joe
Gallery Joe has exhibits by two impressive sculptors on display.
-Susan Hagen

5'5" & and Under
-Deni Kasrel

Mixed Media
-A.D. Amorosi

Razing the Bard
-Toby Zinman

Pop Garde
-Deni Kasrel

May 16-22, 2002

theater

Ink Well

Delhi? Très! Manu Narayan and Grace Zandarski in <i>Indian Ink.</i>

Delhi? Très! Manu Narayan and Grace Zandarski in Indian Ink.

by Toby Zinman

Indian InkThrough June 2, Wilma Theater, Broad and Spruce sts., 215-546-7824

“The rasa [juice, essence] of erotic love is called Shringara. Its god is Vishnu, and its color is shyama, which is blue-black.” Blue-black is, of course, the color of Indian ink, and it provides the outline for this subtle play about erotic love and art and Anglo/Indian politics.

The love affair is between Flora Crewe (the coolly amused and elegant Grace Zandarski), an English poet who comes to India "for her health" and someone in India -- the English officer? The rajah dripping with pearls who gave her a painting? Or the Indian painter whose portrait of her becomes the key to the mystery? Typical of Tom Stoppard's drama, the clues are rich and oblique, the characters complex and articulate, the ironies thick on the ground.

Typically, too, the play plays with layers of time; the stage is often split between 1930, in Jummapur, and the present day, where we shift from England where Flora's sister (the wry and testy Barbara Haas) serves cake and rummages through a box of mementos, to modern India, where Flora's biographer tries to unearth every tidbit about her life to feed the feminists who now worship her.

The temporal and geographic layers are intensified by splitting the stage -- we watch characters in England read letters written 50 years before, while a few feet away we watch Flora in India write them. Add another layer: a voiceover as Flora thinks the poem she writes while Nirad Das (the deferential, intense and yummy Manu Narayan) paints her: "Yes I am in heat like a bride in a bath/without secrets, soaked in heated air/that liquifies to the touch. ..."

And what's a Stoppard play without an academic (William Zeilinski at his dorkiest) who is simultaneously mocked and needed; in fact, the structure of the play depends on his popping out of the wings to provide a footnote so that the audience will understand what just happened -- despite his getting it all wrong. Typical of Stoppard's mysteries, we, the audience, are the only ones who know all the clues -- and then we're still left teasing the hints into a solution.

Indian Ink is full of ideas: about the creation of art, about the relation between art and nationality, and thus about the politics of creativity and passion. The relationship between Flora and Das mirrors the relationship between England and India -- the colonials who fall for the empire they have built, and Indians who love everything English even as they rebel against it. Even long after the British Raj ended, a young guide acknowledges: "Fifty years of independence and we are still hypnotized." It is both complicated and suitable that the very English Flora is dying during the year Gandhi's civil disobedience movement begins.

The woman sitting next to me remarked how lucky we Stoppard fans in Philadelphia are to have the Wilma provide us with a production of his work every year. And in this splendid production we are especially lucky, since hardly anybody in the U.S. has had a chance to see Indian Ink since its London premiere in 1995. This is, in part, because it requires a large cast of Indian actors who are, locally, in short supply. It took director Jiri Zizka four months to cast the show, but it certainly paid off in this finely crafted production.