I am
talking to my friends beside me. We chat about school, about mutual friends,
about the drear in our lives.
Then a
man, tall and smiling, strides into the room. The lights do not dim: I assume
he is simply another audience member. But he does not go to the empty seat;
instead, he goes right to centre stage, and greets us. There, he begins telling
his story. This feels like a conversation where only one person is talking, but
a conversation all the same.
He faces
the audience as he expounds on his story. He maintains eye contact with a few
of the audience members, does a few hand gestures, and tells a couple of jokes
- almost as if he were giving a prepared presentation. Yet, the intimate
setting of the black box provides a genuine sincerity. His story, of course,
being one that is distinctively personal and private.
He bears
his soul, his innermost thoughts to the audience, as if we were his closest
friends. He talks of his closest friends, his family, and most poignantly, his
wife. This story revolves around the divorce that he had to go through, but he
elaborates on so much more on that. He talks of his childhood: how he grew up
with his grandfather being his role model, and how that man taught him to be a
man.
We learn
that he struggled to maintain his marriage because he failed to reconcile his
roles of a husband, a Muslim, and a friend. Divorce is inevitable when his wife
calls him a degrading slur which coarsely questions his manhood, at once
proving the fundamental differences between both man and wife. He can no longer
keep his pride and his marriage: he must choose one or the other, so he chooses
the former.
He later
rues that he should have gone after his wife, to take her back when she moved
out of their house. We see that he is still a flawed man no matter, who
struggles and will continue to struggle with finding his identity. But because
Sani Hussin does such a good job involving the audience, I felt like I was
truly close to the character he portrayed. I empathised and sympathised with
his story, because he took the time to tell it, both patiently and
earnestly.
In the
penultimate scene, he goes to a chair on the stage, pulls a translucent screen
over him to cover himself, and begins to sob. We see him cry, and we see a man
who is fragile and deeply hurt, and not because he did anything truly 'wrong'.
We share in his struggle automatically: we, who understand his story after
hearing him tell it for 70 intimate minutes.
An
average man, who goes through something that is not uncommon in today's
society. But the pain he feels and we see is all real, and all sacred. So, I
cry with him.
And when
he does a Malay dance (something he enjoys and is good at) to end the play, he
smiles widely. So, I smile with him.
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