Jaa Rased has a funny laugh. I’m pretty sure it’s put on; no one except puppet-ed villians laugh by moving their lower jaw — which is what her character, Adi, in Marleeny Deenerwan’s latest directorial work “Dari M Ke M”, does. “Ha, ha, ha!” Adi belted, between swaggers, and when he did almost everyone in the Stor Teater that night laughed along.

Jaa, about to burst into laughter

Adi is a sweeper — a profession he apparently acquired through heredity, “diwarisi secara turun-menurun untuk empat generasi,” — at Terminal M of Pekan Batu 13, and his hilarity is at the expense of Donna (Ismaliza Ishak)’s predicament, who has arrived at the train station of this nondescript town without directions or money for a ticket home. Donna is a cashier at Midvalley Megamall, and she has made this journey for love; her only assurance is the romantic overtures of in her Abang M’s love letters:

Andai diberikan emas permata
Ku pilih senyumanmu
Andai kupunyai mahligai indah
Ku hadiahkan untukmu

“Adakah aku silap?” Donna asks herself at Abang M’s failure to show. Cynical people in the audience knew the answer: Duh — or, rather, we knew that the intrepid woman’s mystery man would not be the suave car dealer he has described himself to be. The irony of this subterfuge, also worth Adi’s guffaws, is the fact that Donna herself is not being truthful: her real name is Sapiah (”sangat kampung,” Donna spits, quite embarrassed), but because of her put-on nama glamour she opened mis-delivered mail (also addressed to a Donna) and started replying — and it is this act of identity theft that has led to the current amorous correspondence.

Ismaliza, hopeful at her prospects 

That, and Donna’s mercenary instincts. She admits that she was impressed by Abang M’s claimed affluence — and his young bachelorhood, so much more promising than the sleazy married men that take her on holidays. “Emas permata” and “mahligai indah” that she doesn’t have to share sound good. “Dari M Ke M” ’s programme states her desires quite clearly:

Donna mahukan hidup yang sempurna daripada segi material dan darjat, kerana dia sudah puas menjalani hidup yang sukar dan miskin … Abang M adalah orang yang akan membawanya keluar daripada perangkap hidup yang membebankan.

As Donna waxes hopeful about Abang M’s prosperity, Adi lies in a corner, pouring over letters. He looks forlorn. But it was entirely unnecessary: when the play’s eventual revelation — Adi is Abang M — came, it was of no surprise to us; we expected it almost as soon as both characters stepped onto the platform. This heavy-handed approach made “Dari M Ke M” veer dangerously close into melodrama — more distressingly, it was largely conventional melodrama. Nothing of what the text says is surprising or new; Adi’s rants about human dignity and of the Things That Are Important is exactly the sort of language you’d expect from an anti-materialist kota-vs-desa dichotomy. That’s a criticism as old as the act of letter-writing, and perhaps as anachronistic.

What rescued “Dari M Ke M” from being a Cerekarama episode was humour. It’s clear that Marleeny, as a playwright, has an ear for comedy: the way Donna told us about her childhood ambitions, for example — that she had wanted to become a lawyer up to the point her father hit her for being a smart-mouth — made it difficult for us not to laugh. More importantly, however, was that the director knew how to make that funny physical. When Adi righteously tries to call Donna on her materialism by asking her whether she could love him, Donna unashamedly exclaims: “Tapi kamu penyapu sampah!” We get it, the upward-mobile poor can be the worst of snobs — but the thing that prevented that exchange from being didactic was that we spent it laughing at her: so disgusted, she spends the next couple of minutes dry-retching. “Uek uek uek,” Ismaliza went, staggering across the (a little too literal) rubbish-strewn stage, and the people seated behind me were toppling out of their seats.

Ismaliza confronts Jaa, right before she hurls 

It is to the performers’ credit that they managed to pull off such fun while not compromising the integrity of their characters. Jaa may have had a weird laugh, and Ismaliza may have been trying to vomit her insides out — but Adi and Donna remain stuck in the tragic circumstances of unrequited love and mistaken identity. “Dari M Ke M” manages to be both earnest and playful simultaneously. The climax is emblematic of this strength: Adi reveals that he can recite the content of Abang M’s letters, and serenades:

Dalam berjuta bintang berkelipan
Kau bagaikan kejora
Antara ribuan mata menikam
Takkan kubiarkan kau tenggelam

to the head of a broom, despair bubbling under his croon. Worse, he tells Donna that they are actually the lyrics to Mega’s “Bayangan Gurauan”. He tells her, all seriousness and anger, that hewill not be responsible for the collapse of her domestic ambition; it is all her fault, simply because: “Kau tak dengar radio!”

After chuckling our way out of the theatre, a friend and I compared the play’s stale politics to its bouncy execution. “It is so refreshing to see a performance transcending its own material,” she commented. That’s true: what Marlenny had to tell was not necessarily engaging — but the way she chose to tell it made “Dari M Ke M” rather good theatre.

(An aside: in the play, Jaa Rased is Adi, a man — and rather convincingly, at that; she captures conventional masculinity quite well — because of a hiccup in production. I thought it was a wasted opportunity, not to explore the additional layers that this happy circumstance had to offer. Donna, arriving at Terminal M to find that her Abang M was not only poor, but a Kakak? That would have been a romp, at the very least. Oh well.

Oh, and I reviewed Marlenny’s previous piece of work.)

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