A new-blood director is staging a triad compilation from his own “absurd” comics, inviting audience to laugh their way out of senseless touches of life. 

It seems that Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, two masters of the Theatre of the Absurd, set required standard of audience’s intelligence that really scares playgoers off when it comes to watching their plays. Yet, “Welcome to Nothing”—Nophand Boonyai’s fragmentary composition of about fifteen stories—did not challenge us to cogitate on our existence before suffering miserably by pessimistic nothingness that eats up all space of our heads. The ads for Nophand’s second play, in the span of only three months, simply says, “Don’t think—just feel!” For some audiences—this reviewer included—, it’s heaven. 

Nophand, who quadruple-tasked as playwright, designer, director, and actor in “Nothing”, interpreted his idea of deconstruction by putting fragments from different lives into episodes. An excerpt from his production concept reads: “Three actors change their roles and acting techniques all the time—comic in one moment, tragic in another, and others may be deemed barely nonsensical. They must be able to act as any characters—men or women. That’s the concept of my play. You can be anything, many things, everything. No attaching to any logics, but serving the flow of actions.” 

On the almost bare stage of “Nothing” adorned only with angled red curtains, the method was really effective in making the audience frequently explode with laughter, especially when the actors clearly and effortlessly shifted their roles, with little help from costume props, from madam to servant, from woman to man, from old to young, and from straight to gay.  

Even though the 95-minute, no-intermission production did not have English surtitles for non-Thai audience, my Filipino and Malaysian theatergoing companions enjoyed it as much as I did. “We can feel and get what they mean by their actions,” they said after the opening night last Friday (April 25) amidst our conversation on the Theatre of the Absurd. 

The play makes fun of social phenomenon in which what we take as serious personal matters—relationship, love, jealousy, sex life, status and expectation—all end with fulfilled feeling of emptiness.  

Like a fairy tale, a memorable episode tells the struggle of a deer hunter’s son who finally proves to his father that he has a heart too soft to follow his father’s footsteps. Disappointed that his son couldn’t pull a trigger, the father left him in the forest, saying that he will be allowed back home only with a dead body of a deer. The son met a mysterious hermit-like character who teaches him how to shape up and soften up a pillow by a stick. Instead of a deer, the son arrives home with a pillow. The father’s anger turns into delight when he finds that not only is the pillow very comfortable, but it also brings back fond memory of his deceased wife. 

The scene raises the beautiful feeling of living in memory as more valuable than earning for a real life. Also, it voices that sometimes people choose to do something nonsensical and useless only to feel good and forsake harsh rational life. They gain nothing that is visible to the eyes but it keeps them alive to the end.  

Apparently, the play is structured under opposite concept from those of traditional absurdist playwrights. It does not try to make any symbolic sense out of nothing, but light-heartedly simplifies complications in life with the fact that they are fertilized from nothingness, and remain nothing until now. Audience, who is looking for some freestyle art alternatives that share restless aesthetics of urban life, would appreciate this impressively choreographed episodic comedy that awhile frees your head from machinal day life.  

“Welcome to Nothing” continues this weekend (Friday, May 2 at 7:30pm; Saturday, May 3, and Sunday, May 4 at 2pm and 7:30pm) at the Crescent Moon Space, Pridi Banomyong Institute, in Soi Thong Lor. For reservation, call 08 6814 1676.

written by Montakarn Suvanatap

published in The Nation on Friday, May 2, 2008

all images courtesy of Nophand Boonyai