The programme synopsis for Peristiwa Di Zoo -- presented by Universiti Malaya’s Culture Centre, the final assessment performance for Ahmad Iswazir and Ellia Norsalle Bt Elias (he acts, she produces) -- has the following to say:

JO mencari teman untuk meluahkan perasaan dan tekanan dalam hidupnya. Dia bertemu dengan PIAN yang merupakan pengunjung setia salah sebuah kerusi di taman itu. Walaupun pertemuan itu bermula dengan kejanggalan serta mengganggu rutin Pian, tetapi PIAN mula berminat apabila JO berjanji untuk menceritakan satu peristiwa menarik yang berlaku sebelum PIAN tiba di zoo pada hari itu. Tetapi sebelum JO menceritakan peristiwa menarik itu, PIAN terpaksa mendengar dahulu segala luahan perasaan dan tekanan hidup yang di alami oleh JO.

With us so far? Anyway, the above tells us several things. One: aware of what “perasaan dan tekanan hidup” euphemistically means, we already know that Jo is a raving lunatic. Two: Pian, in layaning these “feelings and life pressures”, has no sense of self-preservation. He will reap his folly.

Peristiwa Di Zoo is based on The Zoo Story, playwright Edward Albee’s first work -- he’s most famous for giving us Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? -- and a persuasive (also side-splitting) portrait of emptiness and isolation in boom-time 1950s America. The play was staged in Kuala Lumpur by The Actors Studio in the early 1990s, featuring Huzir Sulaiman and Harith Iskander, with Joe Hasham directing; the UM show, last weekend, was directed by Marlenny Deenerwan (who was great in Nam Ron’s Laut Lebih Indah Dari Bulan, and has the park bench-side action transposed from Central Park to grounds near Zoo Negara.

To me, this localisation -- Malay-language translation courtesy of Roselina Johari, Iswazir’s supervisor --was the play’s most interesting feature. Edward’s text examines the despair and tumult of alienation, but never really fingers a root cause (save, perhaps, parental neglect); Marlenny, on the other hand, seems quite certain about the identity of the culprit. In ruminating about the play on her blog, she maps a moral divide quite explicitly: heart, religious belief, and spirituality on one hand; the God of Materialism, spawn of “neo-kolonialisme dalam masyarakat global sekarang ini”, on the other. As if the modern, Western world has a monopoly on personal disconnect, she concludes that:

Masyarakat Melayu di Malaysia juga contohnya sudah ada perangai memberikan label “MELAYU SANGAT” kepada orang yang masih memegang nilai ketimuran, kerana mereka terlalu megah menjunjung trend antarabangsa. Pada saya inilah golongan yang sakit jiwa dalam masyarakat kita. Tapi ini semua dogma siapa???

which is, well, rather a dogmatic statement itself -- but it is one that is by no means uncommon in our Budaya Barat-fearing East.

Thankfully, the performance of Peristiwa Di Zoo stayed away from such preachiness. Jo’s stories about his apartment block and its landlady, and his attempts to forge a relationship with her vicious dog, were delivered with no moralising, letting us see circumstances as the human tragedies they were; Marlenny, playing to the strengths of the text, let us make our own conclusions.

The direction was crisp, with both performers commandeering the stage masterfully; the Malaysian Tourism Centre’s Auditorium Tunku Abdul Rahman is a fairly large (and very traditional) proscenium stage, after all, and we’ve seen more seasoned actors get lost on smaller platforms. Ahmad Iswazir’s nutty Jo, a young man in a jumper who starts harassing park visitors by first asking them for directions, became progressively zanier exactly as his character demanded, with only a few hysterical missteps; his sense of comic timing, crucial in this darkly fun piece of theatre, was spot on.

The trouble with absurdist theatre is that, without our own common sense to serve as a compass, the performance requires a strong logic of its own to be intelligible. Ridzuan Jusoh, therefore, had the more difficult role. The “sane” Pian -- a middle-class printer with a wife, two daughters, two cats, and two parakeets -- was an audience-surrogate, our ticket to being seduced, and ultimately entrapped, by Jo’s condition; his reactions would have shown us the way.

Unfortunately, I found myself being confused by Ridzuan’s actions; instead of being turned off or condescendingly amused by this weirdo who has just disturbed his Sunday afternoon newspaper-reading -- like any level-minded person would have -- Pian allowed Jo far too much leeway to convince. It made the character’s eventual collapse -- the happy family man stabs the troubled vagrant -- more laughable than inevitable. “Kenapa aku macam ni?” Pian wonders aloud at one point, thinking about his quizzical patience. It sounded as if it was Ridzuan trying to figure out his lines. At least he wasn't the student being graded that night.

Still, in a genre where student efforts have to battle the automatic — and largely warranted, considering the quality of some “professional” theatre productions — stigma of amateurishness, Peristiwa Di Zoo was well done. I felt happy. It’s been a while since I felt that way.

(By the way, I recommend Marlenny’s blog as a fun and insightful read into her personal creative processes. Clearly someone to watch. She’s directing Dari M ke M this weekend:

Walaupun pada mulanya ini adalah satu masalah dalam produksi, yang mana pelakon utama menarik diri saat akhir (3 minggu sebelum show), tetapi kami menyelesaikan masalah ini dengan baik, malah mendapat alternatif yang lebih fun dan mencabar. Berapa ramai anda lihat pelakon teater perempuan di negara ini main watak lelaki? Tak ramai sangat kan?? Nah, bukankah ini gimik yang baik? Tidakkah anda mahu menontonnya???

Heh. Kan?

~~~

Zedeck Siew writes and blogs for Kakiseni.

The Kakiseni Blog features spaghetti, religion and theatre. This review of Peristiwa di Zoo first appeared on March 26th, 2008.