Even before a friend and trusted theater aficionado beseeched me not to miss it, I had full intentions of hopping one metropolis over to the Big Apple and catching this particular show. I have seen Paul Knox’s previous productions – “Three Plays” at Wellesley College in April of 2003, a premier of “Informed Consent” in Circle East’s production of “First Light: A Festival of New Short Plays” in New York City, and most recently “Gehri Dosti” at Harvard University in November of 2003 – and have consistently admired his humanistic commitment to theater as a means of celebrating cultural, spiritual, and sexual-orientational diversity. But for weeks, mundane preoccupations kept me from traveling to New York. My friend kept insisting sweetly that I go. Finally, on Sunday, February 15 of 2004, I pulled off a one-day round-trip bus journey along the Eastern seaboard to experience the very last matinee performance of “Kalighat.” The homage was undoubtedly rewarding for me, as I got to witness Knox’s house of theater that shone through with a heretofore unmatched level of brilliance. This article chronicles the performance, as well as documenting an interview with Knox himself.

“Kalighat” was part of MELA, a series of events in New York City celebrating South Asian music, dance, film, and theater, sponsored by the Indo-American Arts Council and held in Baruch College’s new swanky Performing Arts Center. MELA’s publicity efforts beautifully adorned the Center’s entrance hall, and rendered “Kalighat” an air of distinguished entertainment. Before reaching a narrow spiraling staircase leading to the theater, I was accosted by a boldly mocking Kali with dangling tongue, sharing half of her face with a stern and unperturbed Mother Teresa – a East/West embodiment of Janus. The Kali/Mother Teresa avatar dared me to enter Kalighat. Downstairs in a small reception hall, more daredevils and bewitching goddesses thrived. Oil paintings by Sudarshan Belsare, a Boston-based artist and performer, depicted lustful goddesses dripping with emotional fluids and women draped in saffron- and turmeric-colored landscapes. The air was redolent of imaginary spices and raw, moist earth. Alongside Belsare’s awe-inspiring creations, immaculate dancers in monochrome photographs leaped into still air.

“Kalighat,” Knox later explained to me, holds both a literal and metaphorical significance for the play. Mother Teresa’s first home, where the play takes place, is located within what was originally a hostel for pilgrims visiting the sacred Kali Temple in Kolkata; thus, it is actually a part of the temple building complex. Although the proper name given to the home by the Missionaries of Charity is “Nirimal Hriday” – meaning “place of the pure heart” – everyone including the nuns refer to their home as Kalighat. On the other hand, Kali’s ghat – “steps of Kali” – signifies the steps of acceptance or acknowledgement of the teachings and essence of Kali, the fiery goddess of destruction and creation.

Once seated inside the theater, a cacophony of Indian street life mingled with the expectant buzz of the full-house audience: the auto-rikshas grumbled past bartering merchants, and cars sped past oxen carts. You could almost smell India. The set, however, was decidedly sterile, and I could see Kalighat through a thin veil of white sheets suspended in midair. The austere colors and the coldness of cots lying on numbered concrete slabs indicated a wholly detached world without the general chaos of Kolkata. Then the street noises subsided, signalingl the beginning of the show. The white sheets slowly lifted, and revealed an entirely different sort of chaos – one populated by the writhing, dark bodies of the terminally ill and nuns, foreign volunteers, and novices flittering about in a perpetual emergency.

The concurrent layering of voices and movement delivered a powerful beginning, and felt extremely real. Evidently, Knox had worked through a workshop solely dedicated to developing a tangible sense of space for “Kalighat,” whom he considers “an important character in the play.” Knox conceded that it has always been a difficult play to convey the world of Kalighat simply through its pages; readings of the play, which “privileges the text too much as it is,” were not conducive for the andience to understand the power of the place and its effect on the characters living in it. Roughly a year and a half ago, Knox received a grant from the Joyful Noise Fund to produce a workshop for “Kalighat,” and he took the opportunity to concentrate solely on creating the space with some elements of set, lighting, sound, and costumes towards two on-book presentations to the public. The rehearsals did not focus on the text, character, or relationship development, which is where Knox usually begins. During their third rehearsal, Knox requested the actors playing the speaking roles to interview the actors playing the non-speaking roles – namely, the patients and the novices – because he believed the specificity of the non-speaking actors’ identity is vital to the life of the play. As the interview deepened, Knox recalls, the actors were given small tasks to do. One of the novices began sweeping the floor; another was made to mop it with a rag. A few of the volunteers began making the beds and transferring the patients. Soon after, all the actors were engaged in the life of Kalighat, and Knox stood back with a profound sense of affirmation that Kalighat was being recreated before his eyes. This is, he told me, when he was sure that “Kalighat” would work.

What emerges from the initial confusion of simultaneous conservations, actions, and character plots is a tangible portrayal of yet another chaotic day at Mother Teresa’s Kalighat, home for the dying and the destitute. The novices swept the floor, the patients groaned in agony, and Missionaries of Charity bedecked in white saris streaked with a blue trim, evident of their four vows to God – Poverty, Chastity, Obedience, and Wholehearted Service to the Poorest of the Poor – bustle about barking orders to minimize the suffering. Volunteers of various nationalities, each steeped in their traditional accents and attitudes, attend to the patients with varying levels of adroitness.

The patients – the depressed, the shamed, the discriminated and the abused – all had stories to tell. Many of them died on stage as the play unfolds, the causes and manners of death as varied as their histories. Reena, a beautiful girl with malignant cancer, dies despite earnest efforts by nuns and volunteers. One woman was struck in the head by a passing train, and was left to die beside the tracks for three days ere volunteers carried her into Kalighat to grace her final moments. Her broken head revealed a white pulsating mass beneath, which was not her brain but a swarm of maggots infesting her brain. One man died because his transfusion needle was pulled out by mistake. One man died bathed in his own blood.

Faced with daily suffering and their inability to end the suffering, the nuns, novices, and volunteers at Kalighat each arm themselves with idiosyncratic coping mechanisms that endear us to them. Peter, the protagonist, had just arrived at Kalighat in the beginning of the play; his culturally naïve but affectionate and humanistic perspective is perhaps most reminiscent of Knox himself. Peter is optimistic, humorous, thinks lovingly of others, and is gay. He channels good will to his colleagues and his patients and spreads friendship and healing, which in turn are fueled by his hedonistic tendencies and carnal satisfaction. Philip insists on draconian adherence to the path of Jesus, desperately seeking salvation through his daily prayers as if stricken by original sin. But his dedication to God and to the work that God has put before him does not result in rewarding results, and Philip becomes increasingly vexed. Brigid’s pragmatism is fuled by her sarcasm and by Indian pastries. Sydney, whose mother was once a nun, tries to fulfill that legacy by remaining sexually uninitiated and serving the poorest of the poor at Kalighat. Her diversion is smoking and writing letters to her mother. Marina, on the other hand, dances and flirts with dashing young Muslims all night long in Kolkata clubs in her efforts to alleviate the daily stress of Kalighat. With her experience and sharp wit, Marina is the bastion of Western medicine and tries her damnedest to save lives. The burden is sometimes too much for her, but she cannot bear to leave Kalighat knowing that no one else possesses the technical know-how to administer IV needles. Klaus, in contrast, intellectualizes his work at Kalighat. His notions of “ideal poverty” and “ideal suffering” had attracted him to work for the sick, which he later realizes are illusive and futile. Through Klaus, we see the follies of international development theories and the forces of globalization.

Many of the volunteers struggle with guilt, which, they realize during the course of the play, is what had drawn them to Kalighat in the first place. Peter came to India to spread his dead lover’s ashes in the Ganges River, burdened by an immense guilt at not having there for him in his deathbed. Philip is deeply Christian but laden with guilt over his repressed homosexual identity. Sydney is maligned with her mother’s failed idealism, and admits: “When I first got here I actually thought I was here to help someone else.” Sydney struggles with her own identity as she learns that her willingness to help others does not always result in making a difference. Reena’s death shakes her, and ultimately sends her off in search of herself in Darjeeling. When Sydney returns to Kalighat, it is to become ordained as a Missionary of Charity herself. Klaus suffers from an existential crisis – “guilt from just being” – and the fact that “we [humans] can’t evolve beyond an animal that destroys itself.” The despair and crushing sense of futility at Kalighat becomes his new ontological premise, and Klaus thus gains a realistic, if unflattering, perspective of life.

In contrast to the foreign volunteers who reside in Kalighat on a temporary basis, Sister Mark and Sister Alphonse, as well as the novice sisters Christine, Maria, Jane, and Francis, make Kalighat their permanent abode. The sisters find solace in prayers and song, and take Thursdays off as “the one thing you must keep for yourself.” The contrast between the miserly Sister Alphonse and frugal but sensible Sister Mark comes out readily in the play, but Knox remains compassionate toward human error and human weaknesses. Even when pompous Sister Alphonse indirectly accelerates the death of a patient by arbitrarily switching his bed, we remain endeared to her for being human.

What makes “Kalighat” especially powerful is the combination of its potent message and the marvelous confluence of theatrical talents. In an age when globalization exerts a brute force on the poorest of the poor, “Kalighat” takes the audience to a real place of suffering. We learn from Klaus’s anguish over the disparity of a tourist’s India and “the real India,” and are humbled by the grace of Mother Teresa who welcomed Hindus and Christians alike.

The actors were collectively superb and delivered their messages with enduring impact. It was evident to me that the play had very much become a part of the cast members. During a phenomenal three hours, the actors rivet us, horrify us, and bring alive a Kalighat as brutal and powerful as Knox had experienced it. The multi-layered set construction, with Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute in the foreground and a stage within a stage where adoration is performed in the background, was striking. In one unforgettable scene, Kali, Chinamasta, and Sodasi pranced about and lured the audience with their sensual dance in the background as a patient invoked Kali in the fore. The lighting design perfectly complimented the changes in mood, time of day, and privacy. The technical crew executed their cues with due precision, and the entire show kept me dazzled.

Knox spent time working at Kalighat in the late 80’s. He kept a journal while there, and 6 months after returning to the US he began doing some character sketches and creating scenes. He held a reading and workshop of the first draft at Circle Repertory Theater the following year. Knox then felt a need for time to pass. He writes, “I felt it was living in a travelogue kind of place, and I really felt that I needed to let some time pass in order to get a better perspective on what the experience was really about for me. It spent several years in a drawer. I did do some more volunteer work with the Missionaries of Charity in New York City during some that time, as well as some other work around death and dying issues. India kind of crept back up into my life in the mid 90’s and I decided to work on the play again, go back to Kalighat, see what had changed, what hadn’t, and determine if I had gotten enough perspective to being to tell a story about it in a theatrical form.”

“There was a couple of time in our recent rehearsal process that I lost it a bit, when sharing some stories of my experience there. I guess it surprised me that I still had such potent feelings about it. It was always important for me to convey to my actors how important it is to give voice to the voiceless of this place, how important it is to our audience to feel that when the play is over that they’ve been to Kalighat, spent time with these real people, been confronted with their lives and issues. I find it very moving that I had an opportunity to work with such a tremendous cast of actors, design and production team, who were all so willing to go there and commit to creating that life and struggle.”

Knox says there is some talk about doing another production, perhaps in New York, perhaps in India. “Kalighat,” he notes, is a “difficult play to even get theaters to read… they look at the number of actors needed and say ‘too expensive’ and don’t even turn to the next page.” Meanwhile, Knox is planning to return to the text and work on another draft; it is likely to be published in an anthology, and he is willing to take fortuity rule in favor of “Kalighat.” “We talked a lot about ‘divine intervention’ in our rehearsals – how that is such a philosophic cornerstone for the Missionaries of Charity. So perhaps the best thing for me to do is just be patient and let the play have the life that it is meant to have.”

With due regard to Mother Teresa’s saintly auspices, “Kalighat” will be performed again.

The author would like to thank Paul Knox for his time in responding to her interview.

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