Understanding God through theatre

It's not often that an English play creates a stir in Goa. Indeed, barring a few exceptions, English theatre has hardly managed to garner enough interest in the state. But the Ponda based Hauns Sangeet Natya Mandal with it's English theatre production 'Is God a Taoist?' has definitely turned things around.

Written by Raymund Smullyan and directed by Vidyanidhee Vanarase (Prasad), the play consists of nine actors namely Somnath Naik, Vijaykumar Naik, Govind Bagkar, Chatura Raikar, Savlo Phadte, Sudesh Naik, Sudesh Amonkar, Mandar Jog and Santosh Naik. Rohan Naik has provided the music while the set design has been done by Kiran Naik. The show had it's first outing on February 28 at Vijaykumars' Travelling Box Theatre, Ponda. Since then the company has has seven more shows in different parts of Goa.

“This is not actually a play but a dialogue between two characters -god and a mortal,” says Mandar Jog, one of the actors. “The dialogue has been taken from the book The Tao is Silent which was written by noted American Taoist philosopher, magician, mathematican and pianist Raymond Merrill Smullyan. It was one of the first books through which Western people got to known about Eastern culture.”

The dialogue focuses on day to day issues and deals with themes like morality, sin and free will. “It talks about what one should or should not do. It is all about the present and states that God is in what you believe in,” states Jog, adding that they decided to convert the concept into a play to help people understand it better.

Talking about why this particular play was chosen, Jog reveals that the company has invited director Vidyanidhee Vanarase who hails from Pune to conduct a three day workshop with them. “Vanarase was in the process of searching for a script for his next production and we were in the mood of trying something different. Since the company's inception we have dabbled in different kinds of genres, styles and languages and were bored of it. In fact the last play that we did was Shakespeare's Hamlet back in 2006-07. So we were more than up for trying something new,” says Jog.

For Vanarase however the idea of the play has been a long journey born almost 15 years ago. “A friend came up with this ‘dialogue’ as an interesting read. Although it was intriguing, it didn't seem "performable". So it was left at that point but it kept haunting me,” admits the director who has done more thanfifty plays in Marathi, Hindi, Braj-Bundeli, Kannada and English and is the founder of IAPAR (International Association for Performing Arts and Research). However after the Hauns company mentioned that they would like to do something that they have never tried before, Vanarase decided to pick this play. “For some reason, this play flashed in my head. A play that talks about philosophy, which does not follow the typical structure of a well made play, which has two characters but a possibility of multiple actors, and to top it all, it’s in English language. It was enough to try out,” he states.

And so the play took shape and the team decided on using a very different setting for it. “We had to take the audience into consideration. It was highly possible that people who sat for it would get bored with all the philosophy barely five minutes into it if we left it as just a plain dialogue. Thus we decided to use the set up of a restaurant,” states Jog, adding that three of the shows have been done in an actual restaurant so far -at the canteen area at Gomant Vidya Niketan in Margao, 6 Assagao in Assagao and at the cafe in Carpe Diem, Majorda.

And the response to the play has been tremendous with messages pouring in from all over complimenting them on their performance. “Different people have different mindsets However what is really heartening to see is that the play has made people actually sit and think about it,” says Jog.

The play will now proceed to Hyderabad where it will do six shows in the span of two days. “We want to take it to as many places both in India and around the world,” concludes Jog.