THE POST OFFICE by Rabindranath Tagore, directed by John Van Burek, with Mina James, Patricia Marceau, Sam Moses, Errol Sitahal, Dylan Scott Smith, Sugith Varughese and Jennifer Villaverde (Pleiades). At Berkeley Street Theatre (26 Berkeley). Previews begin Saturday (May 7), opens Tuesday (May 10) and runs to June 4, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinees May 28 and June 4 at 2 pm. $35, stu/srs discounts. 416-368-3110. See listing.
Simple tales sometimes hold the deepest messages.
You’ll find that simplicity in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office, which gets its professional Canadian premiere by Pleiades Theatre.
At its centre is Amal, a sick boy who sits at his window and watches the world go by in the process he affects all those with whom he comes into contact. It has the reverberant quality of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince or some of Oscar Wilde’s short fiction.
“Actually, the play does a lot of things at once, but at its core it speaks about appreciating the beauty of life we have, when we have it,” says director John Van Burek. “Amal is the picture of innocence, but with a huge curiosity about and love of life.
“The audience quickly realizes that he’s critically ill, but the wonder is that his spiritual strength grows exponentially as his physical strength diminishes.”
Another of Van Burek’s attractions to the play is that its author, who died in 1941, is considered India’s poet laureate. The first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tagore wrote some 60 plays, though he’s best known in the West for his poetry.
When company producer Andrey Tarasiuk brought Van Burek Julie Mehta’s translation of the play, he realized how beautiful it was.
“It’s quite elusive on first reading, in part because it’s so spare,” says Van Burek. “But the more we worked on it, the more I realized that its economy conceals a vast, profound statement. Like the best poetry, the story is told in an unadorned manner but stays with you after you’ve left the theatre.”
Pleaides’ success with another Indian narrative, Shakuntala, a few years ago suggested that The Post Office would appeal to Toronto audiences. As in that earlier production, Van Burek stages the narrative with the aid of Indian choreography and music.
“Both are part of the Indian theatrical tradition, which has spread to Bollywood films. Hari Krishnan, who also choreographed Shakuntala, could make stones dance he’s drawing wonderful creative storytelling from the actors.
“Composer Debashis Sinha is, like Tagore, a Bengali artist. His forte is combining traditional Indian music with modern electronic sounds. That’s especially important for The Post Office, because I don’t want the production to be a museum piece, but rather to make a contemporary statement.”
Tagore himself, adds Van Burek, was a musician he wrote words and music for an incredible 2,500 songs. During rehearsals, the company discovered a song that Tagore wrote for a planned revival of the 1911 show near the end of his life, in 1939. Sinha has written new music for the text.
“The Post Office has the quality of a magical fairy tale though it’s rooted in something very real. It might lack the traditional happy ending of a Western story, but in other cultures death is seen as liberating and uplifting.”
jonkap@nowtoronto.com
