Orang, Orang!

Alas, ‘the youth today’—that most coveted & elusive audience—seems to be losing interest in Javanese shadow puppets. Through the English language Jakarta Post this week, elders bemoans the loss: Our heritage! Where are our values? What's the matter with kids today!?

In Indonesia—as in all of south & southeast Asia—wayang puppetry has been the traditional form of telling stories from the Mahabharata, & the Ramayana (etc) since the first millennium.

Ten years ago I watched Balinese puppet makers carving & painting rawhide for jointed shadow puppets. Saw midnight performances in an open, stone temple: a large scrim back-lit with an oil lamp; the intricate puppets standing upright in the felled trunk of a banana tree, ready; the dalang—puppet-master—manipulates all the puppets himself & does all the voices, knocking time with a wooden knob held in his toes; an entire gamelan surrounds him, accompanying the story on xylophones & gongs. The performance can go all night. It can go for days.

These are massive Hindu epics, if you aren’t familiar, constantly told as bedtime stories, learned in schools, dramatized on the radio, stage & screen. Until mass media became easily accessible, wayang was like local access TV. With a simplicity surpassing absurd, I’ll say: The Ramayana is about an ogre king kidnapping Princess Sita, & Rama stealing her back with a monkey army (…The Illiad?). The Mahabharata, if you’ll forgive the very attempt to gloss its twenty volumes, is about the five Pandawa brothers traveling home through war & adventure to regain their kingdom from a usurping family (…The Odyssey?). They’re fabulous stories that I’d tell my own children one day.

The point is, puppet-show audiences are dwindling.

A local troupe is trying to conjure the youth back to their roots with wayang orang: that is, live actors dressed & acting like puppets. ( ORANG means “person”—orang-utan means “man of the forest”. )
It's announcements like this, however, that give me an odd, unexpected relief that Evan is studying modern theatre.

What DOES Evan Study?

I know where many of “the kids today" are. Built on the site of an old zoo, the Jakarta arts complex, TIM, has two giant stage theatres, a five-screen movie theatre, a fine arts school in back, & a theatre book store where Evan spent much time in previous visits, & where, he says, sooner or later, “You’ll meet all the artists in Jakarta.”

This week we attended two excellent productions: of the Swiss playwright Durrenmatt's "The Visit" and of Moliere's "The Miser". It's all in Indonesian, of course, but as I've seen these plays before & know the plots it's still a lot of fun. “The Miser” was fast-paced & full of incomprehensible slang, using flamboyant sexuality for its loudest laughs. One of the comic characters was cast as a waria—a 'lady-boy'—Jakarta’s trannie / sex-worker subculture. To listen to the audience, it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. The largely-student audience had no problem calling out to characters from the house or loudly echoing lines they liked.

The star of "The Visit" is on the front page of several papers & magazines this week. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Theatre Koma, the play was adapted to be politically acerbic, citing current Indonesian politics. And THIS is what Evan is here to investigate: the current face of Indonesia—its history, culture, politics, nationhood—as it’s expressed through theatre. Four hours long, it was still well-staged, funny, astute. He went a second time & recorded it: to write a review, for future course material, & to include in his book. The houses were sold out.