Theater Review—

A Perfect Ganesh, Indeed, At The Little Theater

By Julie Stern

Ruth Anne Baumgartner, the chairman of The Town Players Board, in past years has used the July slot to expose Newtown audiences to the intricacies of Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy. Trying something different this year, she is directing a serious, mystical, complex modern play about two middle-aged American women tourists who travel to India and discover themselves: Terrence McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh.

Leslie Van Etten Broatsch and Marguerite Foster play longtime friends Margaret Civil and Katherine Brynne, who traditionally take two-week vacations together with their spouses at Caribbean resorts. This year, however, they have impulsively decided to leave the men behind and take a trip to India.

The ladies are each hoping that by immersing themselves in something so exotically foreign, they will be able to come to terms with a private torment: for Katherine, the brutal murder of her son in a gay bashing incident, and for Margaret, the buried secret that causes her to hold herself at a remote distance from everyone and everything.

Acting as narrator of this journey is the god Ganesha, a playful, whimsical figure with the body of a man and the head of an elephant. Played with stately grace by Rob Pawlikowski, Ganesha represents the union of opposites – past and present, East and West, mortal and immortal, encompassing and understanding everything. When he speaks directly to the audience he is invisible to the two women; the rest of the time he appears in the form of various people they encounter on their travels, from a tour guide and a hotel manager to a boatman, and so forth.

Part of the humor and some of the meaning of the play comes from the way the women’s view of India is limited by their own preconceptions. Clutching her guidebook like a can of Mace, Margaret is supremely fussy, suspicious, fearful of being robbed, and alert to finding cockroaches “the size of poodles” in the bathroom of their luxury hotel.

By contrast, Katherine romanticizes the notion of steeping herself in this very foreign culture, fantasizing about hugging a leper on the one hand, and speaking to the hotel staff in Spanish (since she doesn’t know Hindi). The title of the play comes from her desire to find a perfect statue of the god as a souvenir.

Aaron Kaplan does a wonderful tour de force in playing nearly a dozen different men whom the women encounter: a sardonic airline clerk, a succession of nameless Indian porters and merchants, and even a variety of fellow tourists.

Constantly quarreling over trifles, the two women at first seem like they are embarked on the travel vacation from hell. As they gradually start to fall under the spell of the immensity of crowds and space, and the beauty of the Taj Majal, however, they find themselves revealing their inner secrets and confronting their personal pain.

Because Ganesha is above all a god of understanding, as the women begin to understand themselves and each other better, they are going to be able to accept the truth. In that sense the trip really does constitute a passage of healing.

Staging A Perfect Ganesh is a very ambitious undertaking. Ms Baumgartner, who serves as the production’s directory, has wisely chosen to do it with abstract minimalism. Thus a few wisely chosen cubes and a few panels of railing can be arranged to represent the inside of a jumbo jet, a hotel balcony, a luxury train, a Ganges ferryboat and the like.

With excellent acting from all concerned, and Ms Baumgartner’s usual crisp direction (and lucid notes contained in the playbill), this is a highly entertaining and thought provoking work.

(Performances continue at The Little Theater, on Orchard Hill Road in Newtown, weekends through July 23. For curtain and ticket specifics, call the theater’s box office at 270-9144.

Please note the production company’s suggestion that because of some harsh language and mature themes, this particular production is not recommended for children.)