Me, Myself, And The Mind Of The Insignificance. Photo: Setthasiri Chanjaradpong
At the beginning of the play Me, Myself, And The Mind Of The Insignificance, Pathipon Adsavamahapong’s directorial debut, which finished last Sunday at Crescent Moon Space, actor Pathavee Thepkraiwan proclaimed: “This is a place within oneself. I speak yet I have no voice…What am I?” And we realised that we were about to go on a trip straight into the character’s mind, and the show was not supposed to be fully comprehended but simply felt.
It turned out to be just the case. Dialogue merged with physical movements while real incidents clashed with those happening only in the mind. Pathavee played a woman, a struggling writer who’s damaged both physically and mentally. As expected, the audience were moved erratically from one piece of painful memory, to the current struggle in life, and then to an enactment of what the character is imagining.
Pathavee’s monologue with movements at the beginning had managed to set a melancholic tone to the overall show. He was soon joined by Nattipong Boonpuang, the other actor in the show, who played various different roles to re-enact those scenes.
With any play attempting to project the working of mind and memory, random shifts of scenes and elusiveness on the storyteller’s part are expected. When Pathavee came out as a melancholy singer and performed a heart-rending ballad, we forgot to stop and ask ourselves where did this character come from. This is just the same when Pathavee played a patient who was obviously plagued by some sort of domestic violence or when he played a heartbroken woman reuniting with her ex-lover.
The spare setting was impressive in the way that every slight rearrangement of chairs or desks, we felt transported to a different scene. Still, there were times when the shift was too fast. At one point we were at a scene of investigation, and then suddenly the two characters were old people sitting in a cinema, watching and eating popcorn.
Then the two actors were engaging in an absurd conversation at a train station, one was talking about the possibility, in the futuristic world, of being killed by a computer virus while the other pondered on feminism by humorously giving birth repeatedly in a robotic manner.
Enjoyable, and even touching, though these sketches were, we sometimes wished there was a simplified and rearranged version of what was going on in the character’s mind.
True, in a case like this, it’s usually the intensity of emotion and honesty through acting, rather than the lucidity of the storyline, that actually counts, and Pathavee and Nattipong have managed to pull that off. The question that still remains, however, is how much should the director keep to himself and how much do we as an audience deserve to know?
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.