Alter Ego, Tom Stoppard, and A First Class Man
Tom Stoppard once wrote, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else”, which is a tongue in cheek way of saying that there are opportunities everywhere. I first came across Stoppard in his wondrously zany play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and then by and by got more familiar with his work through my friend and the notorious raconteur Anuvab Pal, a staple of the New York theater scene, rotund in his grubby, coffee stained Thomas Pink shirt and spats. Pal worked ostensibly for Reuters during the day but in the twilight, in dimly lit, urine reeking hallways (he had fallen back on his rent), worked feverishly on his plays, many that Alter Ego produced and none that made money. His father visiting him on those days that Pal habited an apartment was very fond of saying that he would end up like the mad Jesus freak with wild eyes on the 1 train ranting for hours about the world coming to an end. Pal’s father had unsurprisingly chosen not to read any of Pal’s verbiage. Otherwise the similarities would have been fairly clear; both wanted annihilation of the world by different means.
But Alter Ego has made a career of Stoppard’s adage. Legend has is that Puja Ogale and Seema Malik, two Alter Ego members got a blind man to donate his Braille books (a prop essential to a play), after promising him a pair of free tickets to the play. The origin of Alter Ego grew out of a drink fueled conversation between Bhavna Thakur, a transaction lawyer and collector of rare vegetables and Nilay Oza, a toy train addict and an MIT trained architect at a friend’s loft. Bhavna performed a skit of Lady Godiva on horseback that evening, with Nilay clearing the way for her by shoving his host’s dinner table out of the way and rearranging the furniture. Bhavna instantly appreciated his set design skills. The two decided that the next play had to be a horse based one. Fortunately, Peter Schaffer’s Equus lost out to Hayavadana, the talking horse play by Girish Karnad. This was back in 2002. Since then we have been on a tear, averaging one play a year.
Along the way, we have produced Anuvab Pal’s Chaos Theory, a play about the imperfect physics of love and delusion but mostly delusion; Tom Stoppard’s NY premier of Indian Ink, a play rarely performed by theater companies and thus a treat for all Stoppard fans; Israel Horowitz’s The Indian Wants The Bronx, which featured the smarmy Dell computer kid; Anuvab Pal’s Fatwa, a play about two cranky old men eating lots of kebabs; and a reading of Anuvab Pal and Shourin Roy’s Who’se Afraid of Vijay Tendulkar?, a tribute to India’s foremost playwright, in the presence of the eminence gris himself. I have a feeling that he was not impressed by our efforts because he has never returned our calls or emails.
The NY premier of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, produced by Alter Ego, an Off Off Broadway theater company and not by the Lincoln Center was considered a major coup in NY theater circles. It had Samuel French, Stoppard’s literary agents in a tizzy. In the end it helped that the company comprised of members of the South Asian diaspora who felt that they were equally competent in deciphering a play that was based in their backyard. A point that was driven home by Nilay Oza, Indian Ink’s producer. In the end Nilay’s persistence paid off. It took the personal intervention of Stoppard in giving us the rights to stage the play. He was supposed to have come across the pond for the opening but a bout of food poisoning brought about by the consumption of a plate of chicken tikka masala at a pit stop near Holborn kept him away. He did make it a year later but that was for a NYT sponsored conversation with the late Mel Gussow. We had gone for it but never quite screwed up enough courage to ask him about Indian Ink and what he thought of the itsy bitsy teensy weensy theatre company that had beaten back the Lincoln Center to produce it.
Such was the buzz on the play, that our publicity team thanks to the crystal clear Sprint service on their cell phones had gotten wind that Bob Dylan would be coming for the play. Bob Dylan?? Robert Zimmerman?? Was he considering a career change in Off- Off Broadway productions or Just Blowin’ in the Wind? In the end it turned out to be Matt Dillon, who is a lot easier on the eye than Bob Dylan. No offence to Bob but the last singer who tried his hand at acting was Kris Kristofferson, at present seen on ESPN late night peddling hair products amongst TV ads that promote penis enhancers.
The anecdote serves as a reminder of the pulling power of playwrights such as Tom Stoppard. You just have to mention his name and reviewers and celebrities will fall over themselves to come see the play, of course unless you are from the NYT or the New Yorker. Then it depends on the play and the theater company. In most other instances as revealed in a workshop that I attended thanks to a timely call by Reshma Patel, an unflinching Amitabh Bachhan lover, and together we were supposed to do the Bunty and Babli dance number at Bhavna’s marriage last year, till saner counsels prevailed, is that reviewers consider themselves omnipotent. Their egos need to be regularly massaged and with lesser known playwrights and smaller theater companies, it becomes almost impossible to get a Ben Brantley to review. Thus, let us not berate lawyers too much, the theatre reviewer is equally despicable in many instances. Along the way, Alter Ego has learned that you may get the play, but not necessarily, the review.
This brings us to our forthcoming production, David Freeman’s A First Class Man, a play about the Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan and widely considered one of twentieth century’s towering geniuses and his complex relationship with the Cambridge don Professor GH Hardy, his mentor and discoverer, who brought Ramanujan over to Cambridge in the early 1900’s. David Freeman had read Robert Kanigel’s book on Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity, considered the definitive biography by many mathematicians, and it provided the inspiration to dramatize Ramanujan’s life. His early attempts were work shopped by the Lark Theater Company and the play took shape through many iterations.
The story of a simple man with a genius for coming up with mathematical theorems and with little formal training is fascinating because amongst the sciences, mathematics demands the most rigorous proof that is extensively peer reviewed. In contrast, the process in biological sciences is based on empirical evidence. In the face of the overwhelming rationalism seen in mathematics, the stories of Srinivasa Ramanujan and John Nash, Jr, the Nobel Prize winning discoverer of game theory and the protagonist of Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, stand out starkly. In Ramanujan’s instance each theorem was the result of divine ordination, the family deity, the goddess Namagiri: Schizophrenia in John Nash’s lifelong battle with the disease. The work of Ramanujan and his body of more than 3000 theorems have consumed the likes of Professor Bruce Berndt at the University of Illinois who has spent almost three decades deciphering Ramanujan’s handbooks, the ones that he scrawled his equations on a century ago. Springer Publishing, publishes the Ramanujan Journal, the foremost journal on number theory that has 25 editors on the board, representing universities from the USA to Japan. The SASTRA institute in Thanjavur recently instituted the SASTRA prize, in remembrance of Ramanujan. The prize is given to mathematicians under the age of 32 years (the age at which Ramanjuan passed away) for their outstanding contribution in number theory. Manjul Bhargava and Kannan Sounderrajan were the first recepients of the prize at a function held in Ramanujan's hometown of Kumbakonam.
For mathematicians everywhere, deciphering Ramanujan’s compendium of theorems has proved to be immensely challenging and rewarding. But what is there for the non-mathematicians? Well, the equally important task to take Ramanujan out of the ivory tower. We forget that Ramanujan was not just a mathematician, although he happens to be one of the few definitive ones, in the lines of Euler, Fermat, and Poincaire, he was also a human being of flesh and blood. Mathematics proved to be a giant source of sublimation for this apparently simple man making choices that he did not have control of; his education, work, and marriage. His unhappiness in having these choices made for him, drove him from India, much against his religious beliefs to find validity in his passion, mathematics: To Cambridge and GH Hardy, bearing miserably cold winters, starvation, and a society that understood very little of him, to sickness and finally, death. In his short span of 32 years, he lived in those days, a remarkable life. A life that apart from a few of us, know very little of, because so far we have books. And who reads those? But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. A First Class Man, spearheads a line of future productions that are coming out on Ramanujan. Next year, Stephen Fry, a fellow Cambridge alumni and Dev Benegal are bringing out a movie on Ramanujan, followed by Warner Brothers and their picture on his life based on Robert Kanigel's book. If rumors are to be believed, Johnny Depp is playing Ramanujan. I think it probably would have brought a little smile to Ramanujan’s face, to think that the hero of the Pirates of the Caribbean would be playing him.
As for Alter Ego, as we said before, we have found opportunites at every exit. Especially at exit 6 of the NJ Turnpike, where Amit Nerurkar found a discarded toy horse head that served as the main prop in Hayavadana, our first play. We have moved along and are now looking for a serving dish that holds meat, the fancy ones with a retractable cover. We still have about 12 more exits to go. Knowing Alter Ego, we will find it.
