"Is there any objective way to say if a scene—or if a choice an actor has made—is working or not?" asks an audience member during a question-and-answer session following an open table rehearsal of Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children."
There is a moment of silence before Assistant Director Aileen Gonsalvez, who is leading the rehearsal, remarks, "It's totally subjective."
The handful of participating actors—all members of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)—make assenting noises, although one or two insist that the actors ultimately know (on an instinctual level) if their choices are working or not. One actress suggests, however, that the audience's responses to those choices are, at least from her point of view, far too often not even addressed by the actors.
The open rehearsal—designed to introduce interested New York City theatregoers to the often convoluted process of rehearsing a play—was part of a month-long "Midnight's Children" Humanities Festival at Columbia University that ran throughout March. The open rehearsal took place in a black box theatre at Alfred Lerner Hall at Columbia University.
The festival's centerpiece was a dramatization of Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning 1981 novel, performed by the RSC at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. The production, staged in the States for the first time, represented the unprecedented collaborative efforts of Columbia, the University of Michigan, University Musical Society and, of course, the RSC.
Throughout the month, Columbia University hosted more than 20 panels, readings, interviews, debates, and discussions on an array of topics—literary, political, cultural, anthropological, and theatrical—that a complex novel like "Midnight's Children" (and its transformation into a staged work) evokes directly and tangentially.
Among these: the aforementioned open rehearsal, a seminar on "High Art and Low Art—The Mix of Language and Class in Literature," "The Performed Novel" (with actors reading passages from the book), and a panel discussion on "The Creative Process—From Novel to Dramatic Presentation," which featured Rushdie and one of his co-adaptors, Simon Reade, the RSC's dramaturge.
From Page to Stage
The dialogue between Rushdie and Reade—moderated by Jayme Koszyn, the festival curator—was of special interest because of the extraordinary challenges the two artists faced in morphing a large, nonlinear, symbolic, and, at times, stream-of-consciousness novel into a self-contained dramatic work. "Midnight's Children" (the play) has now been mounted in London and Ann Arbor, Mich., as well as New York City.
To make the task of transferring the novel to the stage even more daunting, the co-adaptors had to grapple with a novel that alludes to history, religion, and politics.
Indeed, at its core, "Midnight's Children" is most profoundly a political novel, examining literally and metaphorically India's journey from the moment of its independence in 1947 up until 1978.
Rushdie said that one of the novel-cum-play's central themes is "the relationship between the individual and history. I deal with how the public smashes into the private life. Our age has removed the comfortable distance between the public and private."
On the most rudimentary level, "Midnight's Children" is the saga of a Muslim family; specifically, the journey of Saleem Sinai who, among other curious traits, boasts telepathic powers, making it possible for him to communicate with all the other Indian children who, like himself, were born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947—the moment of India's independence from Britain.
Supernatural powers, passion, and, most crucially, two children switched at birth, all play major roles in this wild, panoramic, comic-tragic tale. There are dozens of subplots and an equal number of characters in the 500-plus-page novel.
Similarly, the play, which features 20 actors playing 70 roles, runs for more than three hours. It is a frenetic work punctuated by video projections—including fantasy sequences and historical film clips—and brightly flashing lights. On stage, it is clearly Saleem's (Zubin Varla) story, his account and interpretation of events, past and present.
Nevertheless, Rushdie described the play as "political theatre that draws on the tradition of late '60s and '70s plays about Vietnam."
And that raises a central issue, Koszyn suggested: What kind of political-historical background does the theatregoer need to follow the work at all (onstage, or in the novel for that matter)? She wondered if and how the adaptors addressed that problem.
"Knowing English helps," Rushdie quipped, and then added seriously. "You assume audiences know nothing and what we offer should be complete, including historical and cultural information. But it cannot be extraneous. It has to be [integral to] the story. And we've talked with audiences to find out what was needed and what [gaps] needed to be filled.
"It's interesting to see the different responses among audiences," he continued. "Westerners [who don't have the historical backgrounds] respond to the fabulist elements. Those from India see the work as a history lesson. One man from India actually said to me, 'I could have written it.' "
All agreed that a major challenge in transferring the novel to the stage was in finding and highlighting the driving through-line, difficult enough in a simple novel. But in a work of fiction that has at least three narratives running concurrently—the tale of a Muslim family, the evolution of an era, and the journey of one man—it becomes especially problematic.
Admittedly, some of the issues had been mitigated because Rushdie had already written a teleplay based on the book. The actors were cast, the director selected, and the shooting was about to begin when, through a series of bad breaks, it all fell apart at the eleventh hour several years back.
"India refused us permission to film there," recalled Rushdie. "So we relocated to Sri Lanka and then following political upheaval there, the government changed its mind. It was shattering."
Still, a script was on hand and that served as a basis for the stage version. The teleplay was a particularly useful guide because of its detailed directions—albeit cinematic—that nonetheless translated into staging, observed Reade.
That said, a lot of work was called for, with cutting heading the list. The potential stumbling block was to trim down the work without violating its spirit.
"We felt three hours was as much as an audience could tolerate and yet Salman felt if it was any shorter [than what we had at that point] it would no longer be 'Midnight's Children,' " recalled Reade. "He asked us, are we doing a condensed version or just showing the highlights?"
Once the cuts were agreed upon, editing came into play, with new bits added and others deleted for dramatic purposes. The sequence of scenes largely remained intact, although some of the dialogue was reconceived and the characters' roles in the narrative underwent a sea change to make it better theatre.
A case in point: Saleem's sounding board, Padma (Sameena Zehra), becomes the voice and ears of the audience—the theatregoers' surrogate onstage.
Rushdie stressed that, "The RSC's detail to language was humbling. If there are three short sentences in a script, the actors say those lines as written. In fact, the actors would point out that parts of the novel that they felt should be in the script had been left out. The RSC is very much a writer's theatre."
The Rehearsal Process
Interestingly, those values very much emerged in the open rehearsal, despite the experimentation that the actors engaged in during the demonstration. Using the text as the pivotal reference point, they talked about their characters' actions and objectives in each scene and the questions actors had to address: What do you want? What are the stakes? And, what do you do about it? A central concern in every scene, they reiterated, was what do I want the other character to do and how am I going to make him do it?
In one instance, Assistant Director Aileen Gonsalvez suggested the scene had become "too cerebral. Let's try and make it physical." The scene in question was between Padma and Saleem. Padma said her intention was to get him to eat. So, how does one do that—through seduction, mothering, or bullying?
Gonsalvez whispered something to Padma that no one, including Saleem, heard. She then asked the two actors to replay the scene on their feet. In this version, Padma was engaging in some kind of strange gamesmanship with Saleem, tickling him relentlessly while urging him to eat. He, in turn, tried to stop the tickling.
The performance was a curiosity, but in the end the actors agreed it did not work because it had little to do with the characters as written.
Nonetheless Gonsalvez emphasized the exercise was not a waste because, if nothing else, it opened up possibilities and helped establish a bond between the actors. And that's integral to the rehearsal process, which serves as a springboard for the actual performance.
"We always start our rehearsal with a warmup involving the tossing of a ball back and forth," she said. "We're all 'keeping the ball in the air,' creating a feeling of team and boosting energy among the actors."
The most intriguing part of the open rehearsal (at least to this viewer) was the question-and-answer segment. One audience member wondered at what point props were introduced into the rehearsal.
Gonsalvez said early on: "It's very important for the actors to be doing what they're supposed to be doing on stage, as opposed to acting it."
Zubin Varla, the actor who played Saleem, talked about the virtue of sporting his prosthetic nose as soon as possible in the rehearsal process. "With it on, I feel differently, act differently, and the others onstage treat me differently, which affects how I react to them."
A question was then asked about the Indian accents. After all, the characters in this work hail from a range of places in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
That was a delicate balancing act, Gonsalvez commented. Authenticity of dialect and accent are of course important, but not more so than the characters' actions. The danger, she said, is that the performers would be paying far too much attention to the way they sounded, at the expense of what they should be doing on stage.
There were many more questions from the audience, but not enough time to answer them. One thing seemed obvious: To judge by audience response at the open rehearsal—and the Rushdie-Reade conversation, for that matter—an engaging time was had by all.