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nytheatre.com review

Kalighat is a new play by Paul Knox that is being presented as the centerpiece of Baruch Performing Arts Center's Mela: A South Asian Festival. The play is set in Kalighat, Mother Teresa's home for the dying in Calcutta, and follows the journey of a group of Western volunteers and the lives of the nuns and patients who inhabit it. The playwright actually worked in one of Mother Teresa's establishments several years ago.

Shown are G.R. Johnson and Susham Bedi in a scene from
Kalighat (photo © Dave Gochfeld).

nytheatre.com review
by Martin Denton · January 24, 2004

In the first scene of Paul Knox's exceptional new play Kalighat, we follow the play's protagonist, Peter, on his first day at one of Mother Teresa's homes for the dying poor in Calcutta, India. He is overwhelmed and so are we: by the sheer numbers of people crowded into the tiny space; by the cacophony of languages and cultures and religions; by the chaos; by the well-intended but utterly inadequate care being provided—"medicine" often means "Rolaids" for patients dying of TB or worse. Knox plunges us into a situation that is shocking and unfamiliar and opens our eyes to the enormity of the problems that he will outline in his play. It's a terrific jolt: a wakeup call for our consciences, and excellent theatre as well.

That last thought is fundamental: as principled and socially responsible as Kalighat is, the best thing about it is how well-crafted a drama it is: if this is medicine, and in a way it is, it's mighty appetizing. That first scene—in the (eponymous) busy makeshift hospital among the poorest of the poor—is one of the best written and best directed sequences I've ever encountered in the theatre: taut and gripping and involving—the audience becomes not just aware but somehow complicit in the harrowing life-and-death struggles that characterize the daily grind at Kalighat.

Knox has written a complex play on a complex subject which I will nonetheless summarize in the single word "responsibility." Peter is a young actor from New York City whose lover recently died (presumably of AIDS); he has volunteered to work at Kalighat as a means of atonement and fulfillment. The diverse group of co-workers whom he meets here all have their own reasons that more or less amount to the same thing. Philip, from England, is looking for God and battling his obvious but deeply repressed homosexuality; Klaus, from Germany, is coping with a very particular form of national guilt; Sydney, from Canada, is struggling to hear and heed a calling that is becoming more and more pronounced. During the course of an eventful week at Kalighat, they and several other volunteers and a flock of nuns from Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity try to heal the sick and tend the hopeless.

Why is doing good so difficult? Peter quickly discovers that it is: he fights with peevish Sister Alphonse when he gives the "wrong" blankets to the patients; and he later is more than chagrined to learn that patients referred by someone named Dr. Jack (presumably homosexual ones) aren't really wanted here. Kalighat is a place of almost miraculous human compassion, and indeed a miracle or two actually happens during the play, as when a seemingly terminal patient named Ali somehow sustains a full recovery even after his IV drip has been stupidly removed by a careless nun. And yet, Kalighat brims with bitter traditional prejudices and arbitrary dogma: the last words said over a just-deceased patient, spoken by the hospital's chief, Sister Mark, with the hard indifference that can only come from years of selflessness, are instructions to move the body to the Muslim or Hindu side.

Knox unsparingly shows us the awful conundrums that these underfunded and undereducated angels of mercy face every day. He also explores the contrasting circumstances of the western volunteers who are in so many ways our guides into the alien world of his play. As in real life, the pressure-cooker, close-quarters existence of these characters is a catalyst for the stuff of melodrama, particularly in the case of Peter and Philip's explosive love/hate relationship. But Knox manages to keep everything on a believably human scale. With remarkable and deft economy, he sketches authentic connections among the volunteers, nuns, and patients that resonate honestly: a comradeship that blossoms into something deeper between Klaus and one of the young nuns; a fraternal bonding between Peter and a homosexual patient named Salim that eventually helps our troubled protagonist achieve a kind of redemption. Even sour Sister Alphonse is given an opportunity to explain herself: how, she says, can she ever be happy when she knows that she will never be as competent or as caring as her superior, Sister Mark?

Kalighat reminds us powerfully of our humanity and all of the awesome obligations and duties that go with it; of our smallness—our insufficiency in the face of gargantuan obstacles—and of our greatness: for every act of human compassion finally means something: a start.

Knox has directed his own script with astonishing grace: the play is long (2-3/4 hours) but our interest never flags. Mikiko Suzuki's unit set, depicting Kalighat itself and a few other locations, is spectacularly good, making clever use of the catwalks, doors, and other unique features of the Baruch Performing Arts Center space. The play's 23 actors are extraordinary. Many of them play nameless patients in Kalighat's men's ward, yet they give each man his own particular personality and spirit. Particularly memorable among the company are Naheed Khan as Margaret, a wily former patient who has stayed on to work at Kalighat; Anna Ewing Bull as Marina, the oldest and most cenetered of the Western volunteers; Rizwan Manji as Salim; Geeta Citygirl as Sister Alphonse; Susham Bedi as Sister Mark; and, firmly anchoring the play, G.R. Johnson as Peter.

Kalighat is, for me, the most rewarding kind of theatre experience, offering genuinely compelling and engaging drama along with something deeper and more essential to take away long after the lights have gone up. It's being presented as part of Baruch Performing Arts Center's Mela: A South Asian Festival; it absolutely deserves a life beyond.

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