The first play of Millsaps’ Player’s one-hundredth season, the second season with Sam Sparks as the professor of theater, and the second season after Millsaps brought Theater out of abeyance is Christopher Chen’s “Passage.” Chen is a young (under 50) professor of Theater at the University of California at Berkley. He lists his race as “East Asian,” which I normally wouldn’t mention, but Passage is a play about race, even though it never mentions race. I’ll talk more about that later.
Passage is an interpretation of EM Forster’s 1924 novel, “A Passage To India.” I originally read the novel Passage in the summer before I entered Millsaps College. I read it because David Lean was producing a film version of the play, written in 1960, which I’ve never read. I read the book because David Lean was not only one of the most remarkable English directors working, he was one of the most remarkable directors in the English language, having directed Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Oliver Twist (‘48), and A Bridge Of The River Kwai. The film was announced with Sir Alec Guinness in a major supporting role. Guinness is a major part of nearly every one of Lean’s films, and, of course, he had also recently been Obi-Wan Kinobe.
“A Passage To India” is often included in lists of fifty or one hundred of the “most important” books in the English language. When I first read it, I was spending time socially with an older woman (25!) who had just begun teaching English in the Jackson Public Schools. She described it as an English version of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Even though “Passage To India” was written some thirty years before Mockingbird, she was right in that it dealt with many of the same themes and developed them in similar ways.
The theme of both books is a divided society, where the division is tragically uneven. In Passage, it’s between the English and the Indians. In Mockingbird, it’s Whites and Blacks. Historically, what happens when you have one of these divided societies is a sort of calm skin or detente forms over the daily injustices. It happens because you can’t live in a constant state of revolution. Look at what it was like trying to live in Mississippi in the sixties. In our society, people sometimes ask, “Why didn’t you rise up and fight the oppression?” the answer is they did, but you can’t live in peace and have a revolution, and for many generations before the revolution, people chose to live in peace, even though it was an unjust peace before their revolution. The same thing happened in India. The novel is written about the period leading up to India’s struggle for independence.
In a divided society, there develops an uneven, unjust detente and balance of cultural powers that leads to its own kind of struggles, and a lot of people have written about that. When Eudora Welty writes about race, this is what she sees. Forster and Harper Lee realize that to really expose this thing for what it is, there has to be an act that pierces the thin skin of civility that grows over a divided society. They create in their stories an unjust, false accusation of a crime; in Mockingbird, Mayella Ewell accuses Tom Robinson, and in Passage to India, Adela Quested accuses Dr. Aziz Ahmed.
In both of these stories, it’s the trials where the author gets to investigate and develop the themes they’re interested in. Sometimes modern critics make a point of the author’s own racism in that Forster’s character of an educated, young, white Englishwoman eventually comes to her senses and saves the day, whereas, in India, in the ‘20s, that most likely would not have been the case. Likewise, Harper Lee is often criticized for setting up Atticus Finch as the great white savior so that her readers in white society can feel better about the situation they created in the first place. Toward the end of her life, we learned that Lee originally had different ideas, but the god-like, near-perfect version of Finch was what her publisher preferred.
In “Passage,” Christopher Chen chooses to take the words “English” and “Indian” out of the play’s vocabulary and replaces them with “Country X” and “Country Y.” He does it to bring out some of the universal themes in the story, and it works, but if you’re familiar with India’s history at all, the Indianess of the story still comes through.
The novel, the original play, and the movie all focus on the trial part of the story. Even though there are scores of plays that are exciting courtroom dramas, Chen chooses to focus instead on the events and attitudes leading up to the trial and barely covers it at all.
Chen changes the script so that it focuses more on the Indian perspective than the English, sort of a reversal of what you see in the movie and the novel. He’s written it so that many of the parts don’t specify race or gender. He does that, I think, to illustrate how both race and gender are constructs we impose on ourselves. Later critics of the film were uncomfortable with Alec Guinness playing a Hindu character. In Chen’s script, he mentions Hindu and Muslim ideas but really leaves these religious differences behind so that you can focus more on human and character differences instead.
Settling into our new space, Sam and his team are learning more about what our new equipment can do. The design of the play is dominated by the painted floor, which incorporates both Muslim and Hindu shapes. Alumni Shawn Barrick graciously donated her time to apply the multiple layers in this presentation. The rest of the set is simple shapes and movable set pieces that fill out the impressionistic style of the design.
Millsaps is in a fairly unique position in that it can produce plays no other organization in Jackson can. Both Belhaven and Mississippi College are limited in the thematic elements they can present in plays, severely limiting the number of modern and contemporary plays they can produce. New Stage and area little theaters all have to produce works that appeal to little theater and regional theater audiences. Millsaps can, and is, produce works that are more intellectually challenging and deal with themes that some of the other educational theaters can’t touch.
Anytime you deal with an undergraduate theater company, there are limits to what you can do with the age of your cast. Everybody you can find is around twenty, which can be frustrating because many of the plays you want to do focus on characters who are around forty; Passage is one of those. I think our cast handles that issue pretty well, though. Most of our kids tend to be more mature and serious-minded than what you get at some other companies. They clearly understood the material they were working with and represented their characters well, even if it’s really hard to portray gravitas when you’re twenty.
Some of the speeches are long and complicated. I was really impressed by our actors' ability to handle the line load, particularly Lizzie, who plays Aziz in this, although his name is never given.
I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but there was a moment when one of the actors went up on their lines. That’s an actor's nightmare. It feels like you’re rocking along, doing your thing, and suddenly, the floor falls away, and you’re walking on a tightrope and really cannot remember what you’re supposed to say next. She handled it like a champ, though, and in just a moment, she centered herself back into the beat of the scene and picked back up where she left off. I was really proud of her.
A couple of things are different that we’re trying this season. One is that Shawn Barrick and her friend Fernanda Coppollaro were offering complimentary wine, soft drinks, and coffee leading into the show. Originally, we were going to do a cash bar, but it ended up being complicated with regards to getting a liquor license and insurance.
You might also find it best to enter the campus by Webster Street (by the cemetery) rather than using Park Avenue, which goes behind the library. Park Avenue is one of the city’s shortest streets and is in dire need of maintenance. Webster Street, behind the dorms and the Christian Center, was resurfaced by the College just this Summer and is perfectly smooth. It may be time to stop using Park Avenue to enter the school altogether. The fewer entrances there are, the more our security team can monitor them, which increases the overall safety and security of the campus. Changing the flow of traffic through campus has been changing every so often since I was a boy. It’s just part of the deal.
There are two more performances of Passages, tonight and Sunday Afternoon. It’s with the trip to see what our cast can do with the material. If you’ve seen the movie, it’s very different from that, but what Chen came up with is very interesting, and the way Sam and the Millsaps Players present it is a really thought-provoking hour and twenty minutes.
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