(Photo: Sinbad Phugra)
On its face, Nirbhaya, which had its American premier at the Lynn Redgrave Theater in the East Village last night, is about the 2012 gang rape of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi. Jyoti Singh Pandey, who was coming home with a friend from the movies, was brutally raped and beaten with an iron rod by six men aboard a bus, then left naked, for dead, by the side of the road. She died days later from internal injuries. The incident spurred angry protests across India, and a documentary about Jyoti’s assault, India’s Daughter, was released earlier this year, banned by an Indian court, and then watched by thousands.
But Nirbhaya, which means “fearless one” – a name the Indian press gave Pandey, who desperately fought back against her attackers – goes beyond Pandey’s story, by also having the actors themselves tell us their own, real-life stories of abuse.
(Photo: William Burdett-Coutts)
First, though, the play begins with a posture: its performers walk, silently, hands outstretched, several fingers held in the air. The play’s writer and director, South African playwright Yael Farber (previously, Mies Julie) says she was struck by an image from the protests over Jyoti’s rape, of a women facing off against a water cannon, several fingers held high in the air. “It looked to me like the future,” Farber said in a Q&A after the show.
With minimal settings, sound and simple black costumes, these five performers (some of them practiced Bollywood actresses, one entirely new to the stage) then share their own personal stories of sexual assault, which they said they felt compelled to after hearing Jyoti’s. The stories are horrific, involving beatings, break-ins, child abuse; one woman was set on fire by her husband in India and still bears the scars on her face.
(Photo: Sinbad Phugra)
The cumulative effect of these five stories is potent, but it is in the intimate details that the play is at its most powerful, and unsettling: the smell of queen of the night flowers mixed with a sweaty man’s musk, the “malignant poisonous pleasure” one woman feels as she is attacked, and the son who tells his mother her badly burned skin is “beautiful like a baby, all pink or new.” At many points, these details made members of the audience cry.
While there are six female performers in Nirbhaya, there is just one male actor (Ankur Vikal) to play the roles of both aggressor and consoler. In many scenes he plays the male abuser, but he also plays parts like the little brother who comforts his young sister after she has been abused, again, in their bed. Vikal plays Jyoti’s attackers, but he also plays her male friend, who went with her to the movies, and desperately tried to stop her from being raped and killed on the bus that night. In this casting there is the chilling feeling that even men close to us can be a threat, and that any woman, and at any time, can become a victim.
(Photo: William Burdett-Coutts)
It is a difficult experience to sit through Nirbhaya. While the play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013, and recently played for weeks in India, it still feels as if these performers are putting on the show for the first time. Some of the actors cried as they told their stories. And their anger was palpable; in one scene, a performer invoked Chandi, the warrior goddess, saying that, for Jyoti’s and for her own abuse, she “wanted to tear shit apart.” The play also forces the audience to watch Jyoti’s rape, or at least something that approximates the brutality of what happened to her that night. In a Q & A after the performance, performer Pamela Sinha said: “The gift of this play is that it’s not fucking palatable,” and she is right.
This play began out of a Facebook message that Poorna Jagannathan, the play’s producer and one of its performers, sent to Farber after the protests over Jyoti’s assault first began. Jagannathan said that she felt “complicit in her silence” over her own abuse, and wanted to do something about it.
And so “Nirbhaya” is a play that breaks the culture of silence around rape, but it is also a play about what sexual assault does to a woman. In several scenes, the performer describes herself as two separate people: the woman being physically assaulted, and the woman whose mind has to be elsewhere to endure it. “I learned to leave my body behind,” one of the actresses, Rukhsar Kabir, says as she describes the daily abuse that happened to her on a Delhi bus. “If my body is no longer here my body stays intact.”
(Photo: Sinbad Phugra)
And it is, finally, a play that is instructive, that teaches us something about why sexual assault happens, and why it doesn’t. After Jyoti’s attack, her aggressors said that they had raped her because they were upset that she had been out late at night with a male friend, and wanted to teach her a lesson. They said she had broken the rules of how women should behave.
In the last scene of the play, which is narrated by Sinha, she describes how she thought her own rape was over, how her attacker said he was leaving but told her not to look at him, and not to move a muscle, and that she didn’t, but then he came back for more. “It doesn’t matter even if you follow all the rules,” she says.
“Nirbhaya” will run until May 17 at the Culture Project at the Lynn Redgrave Theater, at 45 Bleecker Street.