“Goodnight, Ma,” an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning play “Night, Mother by Marsha Norman, was premiered on June 2 at the EMK Centre in Dhanmondi 27. Theatre Company Stage One Dhaka is staging back to back shows every day till June 6 at the same venue.
Directed by Wahida Mallick Jolly, the play is about a daughter who carefully prepares her suicide, and mother unable to stop her. In the Bangladeshi version, Mita Chowdhury, also an actor of the play, contextualised the drama very carefully infusing the social dilemmas here yet keeping the standard of the original play. It offers a candid portrayal of suicide and resonates quite well with people facing similar challenges on the backdrop of the Bangladeshi society.
With the strong performances of the two actresses Mita Chowdhury as mother and Shormy Mala as daughter, the play is perfectly perspicuous and involving, yet beyond comprehension.
The play is limited with the set-up of a living room and a kitchen of a small house which is shared by Shompa and her widowed mother. Shompa’s father is dead. She is epileptic and unemployable.
Even her last job didn’t work out and, for some reason, she is unemployable. Her loveless marriage ended in divorce and her absent son Shuvo is a petty thief.
As the play begins Shompa asks for her father’s revolver and peacefully announces that she intends to kill herself. At first her mother refuses to take her seriously, but as she sets about tidying the house and making lists of things to be looked after, her sense of desperate helplessness begins to build.
In the end, with the unavoidability of genuine tragedy, she can only stand by, shocked and unbelieving, as Shompa quietly closes and locks her bedroom door and ends her intense unhappiness in one fatal, stunning and deeply disturbing moment.
One of the most interesting elements of “Goodnight, Ma” is the stage design and the characters’ interaction with their environment.
Mita Chowdhury and Shormy Mala take full advantage of the set to add interest to their performance and move through the two rooms performing a verity of tasks throughout the evening.
Moreover, Mita delivered a convincing portrayal of a mother on the brink of losing a child, alternating between moments of disbelief, hope and despair.
The sense of banality achieved through the interaction of the characters with their surrounding subtly but powerfully reminds the audience that this could be in any family. The despair of the two women strongly point out the anomalies of the patriarchal society here with strong dialogue.
It is a treat for the people who love live theatre, intimate theatre, acting and feminism.
Playwright Marsha Norman has cleverly set up one start-to-finish conversation between a mother and daughter. The beginning, middle, and end of this real-time conversation are the journey of the play. It is an utterly fascinating piece of writing, which explores themes of family, care-giving, illness, and suicide.