‘Mezok’: A play featuring six actors and a shapeshifting table
Summary
In Jyoti Dogra’s new play, the central characters are all named Pavitra Kumar and the table is the seat of every rendezvous
Actor-director Jyoti Dogra’s penchant for using objects in her productions dates back to 2014 when she worked with a table and chair for a short performance in Japan. “I started working with it, climbing on it. When you stand on a table, you are a different—a changed—person," she says. In her previous award-winning production, Black Hole, she used a sheet in a big way. But it all began with a wooden stool that broke mid-rehearsal. “If that hadn’t happened, Black Hole would have been a different play." And now, the table returns in her latest play, Mezok, as well.
Dogra is best known for her solo work like Notes on Chai, Black Hole, and recently, Maas. But this is the first time that she has traded an actor’s role for the director’s seat in an ensemble piece featuring six actors and a shapeshifting table. They take you on a journey across mountains and towering malls, through stories of desire and longing, frequently interrupted by bureaucracy and fate. Dogra has little interest in linear stories or narratives or, for that matter, in language in its literal sense. But she uses some form of all three to give her piece its unmistakable rhythm.
She began Mezok, which was earlier named Mez (table in Hindi), with no idea or theme in mind. All she had was an image of six actors walking on a table. “You begin with nothing and stay in the nothingness till the end. That allows things to change," she says. Siddharth Sirohi of Baro Design was roped in to design the formidable piece of furniture straight out of Dogra’s imagination. “I had told him that the table must look like a tree had been uprooted. It must reflect in the texture. And indeed, Siddharth’s table is made of old teak. It has a certain coarseness," she says.
Her characters in the play, though, are rootless—in search of homes, lives, and connection. Dogra chooses to layer textured moments and images that can unlock something deeper in the audience. Despite the devised nature of the play, the lines are poignant and often stop just short of being poetic. Dogra’s extensive exercise in elimination ensures that discomfort, not beauty, takes precedence.
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The devised piece began with the cast mining their own lives for stories rooted in their culture and region. A week later at their residency at Prakash Raj’s Nirdigantha in Mysuru, the enormous table entered the fold. It was welcomed and cared for as a new actor— a raw giant member of the ensemble. Dogra encouraged the actors to walk on it, sit underneath it, and note the change in experience. They moved the table around— it stood upright at times and was overturned at others. When they stood on top of it, the actors looked up and said they felt like they were atop a mountain. “Because when you are on a mountain, you look up. It is only when you are in buildings that you look down," says Dogra.
This is how the idea of the fictitious mountain Mezok was born. It helped that two of the cast members (Ambika Kamal and Tsering Lhamo) came from the hills. The group discovered and developed many ideas, and eventually distilled them down to longing for different lives, and homes. The central characters are all named Pavitra Kumar and have the same distinguishing features. The first, a driver from Delhi, dreams of a life in Alberta, Canada. The second makes the move from the mountains to Mumbai to work as a watchman in a glitzy new mall. The third accompanies an army battalion as a porter in high-altitude conditions. A fleeting fourth, Pavitra Kumar, a corporate slave, visits the mountains in search of peace. He dreams of quitting his job, marrying a Pahadi girl, and becoming a potato farmer. The two hill women, though long for the men, live robust lives filled with labour and simple pleasures. The sixth member of the ensemble (the table) becomes the seat of every rendezvous. It stands tall when the lovers meet amid mountains, is dragged around when the women gossip while they labour, doubles up as a passport office, and turns into the door to a childhood home when a son comes calling on his estranged father. The under-shelf shapeshifts into different kinds of windows in an office and a home. It unlocks a new space for the actors to explore.
The table is never left behind and is central to the scenography of the play as the seventh member of the ensemble. It urges you to look deeper, not simply marvel at its form and function. Mezok, majestic and imposing at once, sees you before you see it. It is as much a metaphorical mountain in the lives of its protagonists as the real snow-capped image. But the play does not exist in the fantastical space one may imagine. Its moments are deeply rooted in the politics of labour and class, migration and urban development, and more.
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Much like Dogra’s other work, it doesn’t pontificate but lets the layers unravel for the viewer. Dogra believes it is ‘unconsciously’ political and it's the way she’d like it to remain. “A position is too simplistic a way of doing things. As much as I am interested in politics, when it comes to my art, I am interested in other things," she explains. Mezok has a bare black stage for its abstract world with inventive use of threads to aid movement. As the table is dragged around its periphery, the heaviness produces a coarse grating sound upon friction.
Though discomforting at first, it finds its rhythm in the musical interludes by Kaizad Gherda. A vocal call to the mountain Mezok, by the actors, flirts with the idea of a different realm and escape from reality, but the play never fully commits to it. It’s quite like the lives of the many Pavitra Kumars and their imagined existence in different worlds, so clear yet so far. It creates the space for a track on bureaucracy and endless paperwork. The limbo and the language are in stark contrast to the emotional graph of the scenes. The son, dealing with his father’s death, is seen grappling on an extended phone call with an insurance company. The driver’s flame of hope is quickly doused by the jaded officers at the passport office. And a woman’s search for her missing husband in the upper reaches of the mountains is impeded by forms and formality.
Mezok is filled with these subliminal inner explosions, and a particular externalised one. And while at it, it leaves you on the verge of one of your own, offering a rare catharsis wrapped up in the swathes of an imagined picturesque landscape. Like the mythical mountain, it makes you feel seen — sometimes small and defeated, and at others, tall and hopeful.
‘Mezok’ will be performed at the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts, Bengaluru, 10 May, 7 pm.
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