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.