On the Thai stage, we rarely get to see domestic scenes with nuanced emotional conflicts. No sooner does tension begin to form than it is resolved by a comedic means. In our everyday life, too, Thais prefer to avoid discussion of our emotions. Most Thais don’t spend hours in therapy sessions every week. Our first instinct is not to seek out professional help to fix our psychological health.
But so far this year, we have already seen two plays that directly deal with depression and grief on the Thai stage.
Earlier this year, we saw Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Arts’ production of Cheevit Dee Dee, translated and adapted from Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing, by Pawit Mahasarinand. It’s a beautiful, cathartic play about a young person forced to deal with her mother’s depression and suicide attempts. With constant audience participation that was designed to be warm and communal, the play was a perfect fit for an audience that rarely comes face to face with these issues in the arts and the public space.
And now at Thong Lor Art Space, there’s Stick Figures, a play by American playwright and screenwriter Josh Ginsburg, about the dark, the bright and the ambiguous side of the industry of grief.
Ginsburg imagines a society where people grieve the deaths of their loved ones by hiring “surrogates” to play the departed until regrets are undone or missed opportunities are fulfilled.
Molly is one of these surrogates. She is not just efficient and clinical — writing down every little detail of the dead and the nature of their relationship with her client, asking sensitive and private questions in her firm, reassuring voice — Molly unwaveringly believes in the virtue of her profession. She has an answer for every question raised about the ethics and the effectiveness of what she does.
At the start of the play, Molly is a surrogate for Carol and Dennis who lost their teenage daughter in a car accident. While still playing daughter to grieving parents, she begins another surrogate gig for Samuel, a man whose wife just succumbed to a long illness.
As a surrogate, Molly does everything the dead once did to replicate the relationship they once had, even at the risk of wounding them. She challenges Carol and Dennis’s authority and chuckles at Samuel’s effort to improve a troubled sex life with his wife. But when Carol and Dennis’ son Graham returns home to find Molly playing his dead sister, the grief professional is forced to deal with the true motivation behind her choice of career.
Although Ginsburg’s play has an interesting and original premise, it also swerves into predictability. Of course, Molly has an issue she has never dealt with, and that has to do with why she became a surrogate. Of course, in his grief and loneliness, Samuel confuses Molly with his wife. Funnily enough, Molly doesn’t have a psychological explanation ready for any of these situations.
But Stick Figures is not about chastising someone like Molly or her morally questionable profession. Carol and Dennis truly believe they are being helped. And Samuel is able to give his wife something she couldn’t have and say the words he didn’t get to say to the woman he still loves, or at least in the presence of another human being.
The words “stick figures” are mentioned towards the end of the play as the Carol and Dennis not only accept their daughter’s death but wonder about their new identity as parents who just lost a child.
“What’s the name for people like them?” they ask.
Grieving people may all seem the same on the basic level, like stick figures. And plays like Every Brilliant Thing and Stick Figures help highlight both the mundanity and universality of feelings that accompany the loss of a loved one. But they also show us that there is no one way to grieve and many words and languages for experiences of loss.
It’s not that unusual to see Thai stage writers and directors give a lighter treatment to plays by European and American playwrights with rich psychological portraits, resorting to comedy or falling back on the soap-opera formula we are more familiar with. As a result, actors give us lean portrayals of their characters and, with the theatre scene being so small, are made to return to their comfort zone time after time.
That is not that case with director Pattarasuda Anuman Rajadhon, who directed English-speaking and Thai-speaking cast of the play. For the professional stage, Pattarasuda often directs operas and gives them contemporary Thai interpretations. In her past efforts to make opera more appealing to the younger audience, she could be clunky and too literal.
With Stick Figures, however, Pattarasuda struck the right balance and drew powerful performances out of the actors. Her simple, clever and beautiful set design, too, allows the audience to see the characters in their more private moments, going through the process of grieving, even as another scene is being played out.
True to her spirit, Pattarasuda also experimented with slightly different interpretations with the two casts — a more explosive and devastating one for the English cast and a quieter but no less emotionally taut one for the Thai cast.
Sasapin Siriwanij, as Molly in the English cast, plunged deeper into the character’s emotional mess than her counterpart Varattha Tongyoo, who nevertheless gave a touching, if more reticent, performance.
The English-speaking cast did better at drawing laughter from the audience, however (I saw the English version on June 1 and the Thai version the following evening). Sasapin relished in playing a quick-witted teenager and rehearsing a silly dance routine, and Quanchanok Chotimukta surprised with her humorous and poignant turn as Carol.
It’s no longer a surprise that English actor James Laver can give a solid and moving performance. As Samuel, Laver wears the grieving man’s loneliness on his sleeves. But while Laver’s Samuel is awkward and more fragile, Wasu Wanrayangkoon betrays little of his character’s grief.
Wasu is a member of the physical theatre company B-Floor, but he is no less compelling or comfortable in a conventional play. Here, he stood out for the most subtle and heartbreaking performance in the Thai cast.
Stick Figures continues at Thong Lor Art Space until June 30 at 8pm, with 2pm matinees on Saturdays and Sundays. The play is performed in Thai and English with no subtitles. Tickets are 550 baht, 450 baht for advanced payment and 400 baht for students with advance payment. Call 09-5924-4555, visit the Facebook event page, goo.gl/ZnkAfG, or send a message to www.facebook.com/thonglorartspace/.
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.