The Moo Moo Field Photo: WICHAYA ARTAMAT
After two-year hiatus, Jaturachai Srichanwanpen is back with his new play The Moo Moo Field, an adaptation from American playwright Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, and in it, actor Khalid Midam shines.
It’s a comedy: five people — Kittiphon Udomrattanakulchai, Kriengkrai Fookasem, Khalid Midam, Nualpanod Khianpukdee and Punika Rangchaya — meet in an acting class and, week by week, we follow as stories of each character progresses, the main plot being the romance between Chart (Khalid), a bashful divorcee, and Sarin (Nualpanod), a lively and aspiring actress.
The choice of play echoes Jaturachai’s previous work in 2014, The Comments: Kam Kid Hen, in a sense that it again reflects the director’s own fascination with the actual experience in theatre-making and the work that is built up from some of the elements or structures in theatrical creation.
The Comments, Jaturachai’s original script, led the audience behind the scenes as we watched the director, actors and staff turn against each other with insulting and hurtful criticism before the story spiralled into surrealism with a case of a mysterious murder.
The Moo Moo Field, meanwhile, is more pop. We watch as actors participate in some of the exercises in an acting class — becoming objects or animals, acting out and telling life stories of a classmate — and through these games, the characters’ backgrounds and feelings are gradually unveiled.
We learn, for example, that the relationship between acting coach Mutt (Kittiphon) and Samart (Kriengkrai), her husband who is also in the class, is in a rocky stage when they are asked to act out as parents of a classmate and end up really arguing with one another. We watch as a romance between Chart and Sarin grow — love messages are passed through another classmate when she acts out, as an exercise in acting, as Chart.
True, The Moo Moo Field is pop — romance growing and fading or old relationships collapsing then being rekindled — but it is with the techniques these stories are told that the show is enjoyable and sharply funny. The credit for that is to the original script by Annie Baker, but also to Parnrut Kritcharnchai who has adapted and given a Thai feel to it.
One of the persistent problems with comedy in the Thai theatre is how directors — Parnrut Kritcharnchai with her recent play Ni Kue Satarn Hang Phab Kanglung (This Is The Place Of The Hidden Picture) or Jaturachai’s previous adapted work The Plastic Girl — often rely too much on the actors’ own comic personalities, with the accustomed audience too readily responsive to that rather than the actual content. In The Moo Moo Field, however, actors like Khalid or Kittiphon have managed to pull off the balance between jokes prepared and the sense of humour that flows out just through acting naturally as their characters.
The Moo Moo Field continues until Aug 15 (except Tue and Wed) at 7.30pm at Democrazy Theatre Studio. Tickets cost 550 baht. For reservations, call 086-899-5669. There are English subtitles.
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.