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She Wears a Peacock Crown

nytheatre.com review by David Hilder
August 15, 2005

She Wears a Peacock Crown, from Epic Actors’ Workshop & Choir, is a pair of pieces based on stories by Bengali writers Rabindranath Tagore and Mahasweta Devi, highlighting “the consequences women endure in their struggle for survival and freedom, their potency and courage, sacrifices they make with their body and soul to sustain life on this Earth.” That’s a pretty tall order, certainly a worthy one, and it’s a shame this production fails to satisfy its lofty goals.“The Journey” focuses on the young caretaker (Taniya Sen, who co-wrote this adaptation) of a bedridden woman (Lilabati Majumdar) who regularly reads the older woman’s diary to her. The tale from the diary highlights the older woman’s unhappy marriage and her close friendship with her young sister-in-law, who ends up in her own unhappy arranged marriage. At the same time, the caretaker is in her own bad relationship, but having fled her parents’ house, she feels trapped. The revelation of another diary provides insights into the older woman’s life that help the caretaker make the next step in her own life. The dramaturgy is not always strong (why does the young woman stop reading one painful story when it has upset the older woman, but then jump directly to reading the woeful story of a stillbirth?), and none of the revelations is particularly surprising. And Sen does not make her character’s emotional outbursts convincing, nor does Majumdar render her active (though nonspeaking) role credibly.“The Breast Chronicle” fares much better, thanks to a lively, engaging performance by Gargi Mukherjee, who narrates and plays all the characters, nearly a dozen. Jashoda is a Brahmin woman, a devoted wife and mother, who, through a series of events, becomes the wet nurse to all the children of the Haldar family daughters-in-law (there are many). When Jashoda’s husband learns of her employ, he figures that in order to keep her breasts full of milk, he will have to impregnate her every year. And so it is that Jashoda nurses some fifty children over the years, twenty of her own and thirty Haldar grandchildren. But of course, eventually, she can no longer fulfill her duties, and in fact as the Haldars have aged, there is no need for her to do so. Jashoda’s decline is certainly moving—her husband and sons abandon her, as do the Haldars (though she finds her way back into their household), she becomes ill—but it is so protracted in this adaptation that its impact is severely diluted. And yet, throughout, Mukherjee is simply wonderful, finding the essential humanity in every character she plays, and narrating beautifully. She is a tremendous actor.Bringing these tales to the stage—particularly “The Breast Chronicle”—is an interesting idea. But Sakti Sengupta’s sluggish direction and insufficiently taut adaptations only serve to undermine all the good intentions in the world.