Play lifts the lid on our culture baggage

Play lifts the lid on our culture baggage

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Melbourne

Indonesian drama and theater have been performed in Australian
cities from time to time, but there is something special about
Tinted Windows, a play written and directed by Indonesian-born
Sri Pudjiarti Dean, a Melbourne actor and radio broadcaster.

To begin with, it has a small but multicultural cast. The
story is set in an Australian city, involving Indonesian and
Australian characters, each with his or her own personal history.
Sri's group, Soulplay, performed the play in early and mid
October at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

The minimalist stage set somewhat promised that the drama
relied on the strength of the actors' characterizations. With
only four actors, that certainly is ambitious.

The first night, however, did not let the audience down.

The opening scene aroused interest and curiosity with the
visit of a beautiful youngish woman to the apartment of an older
and plainer woman. As the dialogue developed, it became obvious
that Aerin, the visitor, had accused Mira, who was a popular
writer, of having an affair with her husband Josh. And Mira did
not deny it, though she maintained that her relationship with
Josh did not in any way undermine the solidity of his marriage to
Aerin, as if Josh were living in two realities.

As the story unraveled, the two realities were pushed to the
fore, framed by layers of background, which went back to the
political turbulence of the mid-1960s in Indonesia, where Mira
was born and brought up, and where Josh spent 15 of the first 18
years of his life.

Through the interaction between the distressed Aerin and their
long-time Indonesian friend Julia, the first background layer
panned out.

As a three-year-old, Josh Newman was brought to Indonesia by
his parents where his father had a successful business venture.
In his adolescence he fell in love with Ida, the daughter of a
high-ranking official in the Soeharto government. Unfortunately
for them, the Newman's business was not in Soeharto's circle, so
the liaison did not receive Ida's parents' blessings.

On the Newman's part, they also had misgivings about Ida being
a Muslim. With Julia as a decoy, the couple managed to continue
meeting, until Ida's parents put a stop to it by having
bodyguards follow Ida everywhere.

In desperation Ida committed suicide, an act which in youthful
passion, Josh tried to copy. Lucky for Josh, Julia came to his
rescue, and became his guardian angel ever since, pulling him out
of deep depression and preventing successive acts of self-
destruction.

Seemingly over the tragic event, Josh returned to Australia,
landed a well-paid job and married Aerin, who came from a
dysfunctional family, driven to prove her own worth through
professional achievements. The veneer of a happy family became
clouded by Josh's emotional attachment to Mira, which to him was
a validation of his secret yearning for the late Ida.

Another layer which panned to the fore was Mira's past, which
in her 40s made her feel less scrupulous about her relationship
with Josh, knowing that both of them filled a void in each
other's lives.

Sri has proven her talent as a scriptwriter by revealing
important information about the characters' background in a
gradual manner, thus holding the audience's interest throughout
the play. The actors -- Sri herself as Mira, Yehuda Kaplan as
Josh, Natasha Borg as Aerin and Anne Lo as Julia -- were
skillfully compact and mutually supportive. They also managed to
avoid the mistake of many nonprofessional players: overacting.

The story content explores the impact of the cultural baggage
people from other countries bring to their lives in Australia,
and how this interplays in the new surroundings. The story is
universal in its theme of a cultural interweaving of people who
have to face the challenges of living in an increasingly
borderless world.