Teater Mandiri presents gloomy viev of Motherland

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The theater company of prominent playwright Putu Wijaya, Teater Mandiri, is known for promoting performance art as a tontonan (spectacle) -- a genre that gives primacy to visual forms that often shun dialog, plot, characterization or conflict, as in conventional theater.

In its past productions, Teater Mandiri has presented a visual feast of color, sound and movement so powerful that it became a mental terror for the audience, aiming at shocking and shaking to the core many of their preconceived beliefs.

However, in its latest production, Jangan Menangis Indonesia (Don't Cry Indonesia) Mandiri has shelved, albeit not altogether, the shock therapy method and resorted to the most rudimentary element in theater: dialog.

Putu, who serves as director and a lead character in the production, appears to believe that the myriad problems plaguing the country are so chronic that he needs to speak his troubled mind loudly in the script.

After embracing formalism for a lengthy period, Putu has now decided to adhere to social realism in Jangan Menangis.

In doing so, he has borrowed the craft of actor Butet Kertaredjasa whom he used as the play's mouthpiece in chronicling the country's endless plight.

During the two-hour production, Putu cast Butet to relay his social commentary -- with plenty of sarcasm -- on the country's ills of unbridled corruption, rampant human rights abuse, social injustice and the domination of men in people's public and private lives to the plunder of the country's natural resources.

Casting Butet in the role, however, turned out to be a double- edged sword for Putu. With his heavy Javanese accent, the Yogyakarta-based actor managed to infuse much-needed entertainment and humor into the play's claustrophobia.

This emanated from the play's score and the continuous display of a collage of disturbing pictures on a white backdrop that framed the stage.

However, Butet's unscripted jokes often damped down the play's pensive and brooding mood.

Oppression of the left

Opening with a scene of the country's first president, Sukarno, enacted by Butet with gusto, who delivered a speech on Pancasila (the state's five basic principles), the play soon delved into the country's long history of violence.

After the Sukarno figure faded from the stage, an unnamed character played by Putu delivered a soliloquy about why so many had died during the 1965 massacre. "Is it because the head of our national emblem Garuda (eagle) bird faces right, so that people on the left side must be obliterated," Putu mused, referring to the leftist movement of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

Later, with TV soap opera actress Rieke Dyah Pitaloka playing the role of slain woman labor activist Marsinah, Putu touched on the subject of repression against woman in all aspects of life.

In a lengthy conversation with the Marsinah character, peppered with a healthy dose of cheap jokes, Putu attempted to question the prevailing domination of men over women.

"Are you Marsinah, who was murdered under mysterious circumstances?" Putu asked Rieke.

"She is not the only Marsinah in this country. There are thousands of Marsinahs in the country. In my case, I was murdered because my husband, a member of the House of Representatives, remarried," Rieke said.

Right after the Marsinah scene wraps up, Putu revisits his old method of shock-and-awe.

In a scene culled from an earlier production, the twenty-year old classic The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole, Putu assigned his actors and actress to enact a disturbing scene of a woman raped by a group of men and also by a giant doll with a giant phallus, the hard-won struggle against the oppressive doll, a scene that could be perceived as a visual representation of the repression perpetrated by the bureaucracy and a patriarchal society.

Coupled with otherworldly dissonant sound, the works of Depot Kreasi Seni Bandung (DKSB) and psychedelic lighting, the scene successfully created a sense of impending doom and the futile battle against the powers that be.

"Our history has fallen apart and the only solution is suicide," Putu said by at the scene's end.

This was the farthest Putu went in revisiting his past technique; before long he passed the baton back to Butet for a lengthy monologue about rampant corruption, which again produced giggles from the audience.

"There is no virtue without vice. It is corruption that defines us as human beings. Without corruption there would be no sermons from religious leaders condemning these practices, no Corruption Eradication Commission nor anticorruption, non- governmental organizations," said Butet, mimicking former president Soeharto, to roars of laughter from the audience.

If the audience, tired of high-blown social critique, had grown oblivious to Putu's hectoring, at least it was amused by Butet's antics.