Courtesy of Gitana Productions
If good plays could be built on good intentions alone, then Gitana Productions' Faultlines would certainly be a great play. It is about domestic violence in Indian relationships, and concludes with a little bit of information about what Indians in America can do when faced with an abusive spouse.
But the play doesn’t succeed as compelling theater, nor does it really succeed as a teaching tool. The play is about Niragha Patel (Anita Shastri), who lives in India, is college-educated, and single. Her father “Papa” Rishi Patel (Ashok Mallyas) pressures her into getting married, even though she would prefer to go to graduate school.
She meets Daman Gupta (Christopher Lyons), who she agrees to marry because he will allow her to go to grad school, and her little sister is in love with his brother. Everyone’s excited about the match, except Niragha, who has misgivings about Daman’s character. Her misgivings are quickly confirmed when, a day or two after the wedding, he slaps her. The abuse continues when she follows him to America, where he works as an engineer.
While it may seem that Niragha’s dutifulness causes her to be a victim of domestic violence, this is no Lars von Trier-style story in which the victim’s self-sacrifice is what leads to her destruction. Playwright Patton Chiles makes it clear that there's a larger system in place that victimizes Indian women, not only through arranged marriage and the stigmatization of divorce, but also through Hinduism. The gods Rama and Sita are at fault too for creating an image of the ideal woman as submissive and obedient to her husband.
This takes away any compelling aspects of character—Daman isn’t particularly charismatic or scary, and Niragha doesn’t seem particularly victimized or scared—the play becomes mostly social analysis. We get some advice on how men are supposed to treat their wives, how women are supposed to handle domestic violence, and lessons on the importance of marriage in India. The characters never become substantial, or even particularly important, and their story is so paint-by-numbers that it hardly holds the interest.
Of course, the counter argument could be that sacrificing story, character development, and the like is all in the name of a larger cause, conveying a message about domestic violence in India and in Indian marriages. But this fails, too. The play offers a distinctly western view of India and Indians that doesn't stray far from the typical comforting/alarming stereotype.
We’re comforted in the reassurance of our own feelings of superiority: we westerners allow women to go to grad school and we allow people to get to know each other before they get married. The alarming aspects of the story, that he beats her and tries to kill her only offer more reassurance as to the badness of their system as opposed to the goodness of our system.
In other words, it's the typical approach to foreign cultures that has been taken in Western art since The Travels of Marco Polo or Four Feathers. It's no surprise when Niragha's American friends are the ones who swoop in and save her from being murdered by her husband and then extract her from her marriage when Niragha's father essentially turns his back on her (though Daman's brother Sharma does offer Niragha a home should she choose to leave her husband).
Though there is not much to say about the acting or staging of the production (both were sub-par) two actors do deserve a brief mention: Jackson Dennis, who played the young neighbor Truman, and Daniel Johnson, who played his older brother Dakota. Though young, they were both engaging and even pulled off a few physical jokes without falling into the typical child actor trap of overdoing it.
On the whole though, the show wasn’t as good as it could have been, and when dealing with such an important topic, that’s really a tragedy.
