8/13/2004 » Theater

One of my favorite playwrights, Anuvab Pal, has a new play out at the NYC Fringe Festival beginning tomorrow, Aug. 14. Pal compares favorably to Salman Rushdie in verbal pyrotechnics and Tom Stoppard in barbed wit, and he’s starting to get mainstream recognition.

Fatwa is a thinly disguised satire of Rushdie’s horrific hide-and-seek with the mullahs. Here’s the synopsis:

A comedy about two elderly men who try to take advantage of the current American political climate to fulfill lifelong artistic desires. Both men have famous names, but are not famous themselves. They are failed writers who in attempting to promote a blasphemous novel, attempt to engineer a fatwa...

If it’s anything like Pal’s play Chaos Theory, it’s going to be sheer candy, like Woody Allen minus the neuroticism. Some excerpts from Chaos Theory:

Sunita [older]: A girl just got her living, breathing boyfriend into a fictitious, yet almost fatal car accident, and all over an easy five-pager on Rushdie.

~ ~ ~

Mukesh [older]: Why are you bored?

Student: I don’t know.

Mukesh [older]: Do you hate the Romantics?

Student: Um — not really.

Mukesh [older]: Do you prefer a form a literature in violent opposition to what I’m teaching? Are you a Dadaist or Surrealist? Bit of a Breton?

Student: Um – what, no – I’m an American. 

Mukesh [older]: Andre Breton, you goat — tell me, have you read the Blake poem?

Student: I – um – I meant to.

Mukesh [older]: I meant to climb Mount Everest, Mr. Dakar, but I haven’t done it, have I? Tell me, have you read anything?

Student: Not really – I don’t let other people’s creative side interfere with mine.

Mukesh [older]: Completely vacuous, I see — how about Shakespeare?

Student: Yeah – I mean, I know most of the stories.

Mukesh [older]: Then this should be easy for you. Tell me, Macbeth was the king of ...?

Student: Oh – fuck – I knew this – Greece, or Rome, or one of those old places…

[They look at each other — a second’s pause]

Mukesh [older]: This is like trying to reason with cement.  Have you any opinions on anything, Mr. Dakar?

Student: I – cement – what – I don’t, no – [pause] what?

Mukesh [older]: Mr. Dakar, you are a gigantic waste of vacant space, an unnecessary burden on the world’s resources of oxygen, and by far the silliest, most incompetent, slovenly piece of lazy, insignificant genetic waste that somehow coalesced together to disfigure itself into an aberration of a human being – a temporary distraction, a nothing, God’s idea of a human semi-colon in the sentence of life. I would humbly request you thus to get out of my class, why, preferably, the general vicinity of Manhattan, before I have you chased out by 12 viscous bloodhounds.

Student: [walks out] Fine — go to hell — I’m dropping this class — this course is not even a requirement for the English major.

Mukesh [older]: May the course be with you, Mr. Dakar!

Alter Ego is a desi theater company of Bruce Waynes: overworked corporate cogs by day, creative drama geeks by night; one mask sad, one mask happy. That kind of well-roundedness and artistic hivery is one of the most wondrous things about desis in Manhattan. They do great work; their previous production, Indian Ink by Stoppard, was that play’s NYC debut. It was quite slick for an off-Broadway production, they’ve got some drama people who apparently have been doing this a long time, and a couple of their volunteers are friends.

You know you haven’t dug a good Fatwa in awhile when your blasphemy quotient is running low. Pal will make you laugh, he’ll make you weep. Go see it.

‘Fatwa’ by Anuvab Pal, NYC Fringe Festival, Players Theater, Studio 3C, 115 Macdougal St. between Bleecker and 3rd, New York, NY, Aug. 14-15, 20-22, 25, 26, tickets at TicketWeb