Sudipto Chatterjee’s Bengali adaptation of O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, entitled Basona Brikshamule, premiered in July of 2001 in Calcutta and is currently in repertory across India. The production has won two Preranaa Drama Awards for best actress (Tulika Basu) and best supporting actor (Shantilal Mukherjee). Chatterjee wrote the script for Basona Brikshamule and served as musical director and songwriter, even performing a few of the songs himself. Having received his Ph.D. from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, Chatterjee is currently an assistant professor in Tufts University’s Department of Drama and Dance. He is also an accomplished singer, actor, filmmaker and director. 

Fleming: When, as a reader and a playgoer, did you have your first encounter with the work of O’Neill? 

Chatterjee: As a reader, my intial exposure to O’Neill was during my first year of college. A professor of mine encouraged me to read Mourning Becomes Electra over the course of one sitting, and I did, staying up all night. It was an intense experience. I had only read the Greek variations on the story, and encountering O’Neill’s version was quite fascinating. Before that, I had known of O’Neill from Ajitesh Banerjee, my theatre-guru, who was a master at adapting foreign plays into Bengali. This was around 1979 or 1980 and Ajitesh-kku (as I addressed him) was helping someone with an adaptation of Desire Under the Elms and I was aware of it, although I never got around to reading either O’Neill’s original or its Bengali avatar. The adaptation was subsequently staged. Just one performance and I missed that too.

My first visual encounter with O’Neill was when I attended a retrospective of his plays on film at the American Center in Calcutta. I remember seeing terrific black and white versions of The Emperor Jones, Strange Interlude, Anna Christie and, of course, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. That must have been around 1986. And by then I had read most of O’Neill’s plays.

The first time I actually saw O’Neill on stage was not until I came to the United States in 1988, for the International Playwrights’ Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT. Talk about the O’Neill connection in my life! Shortly after the conference began, the delegates were taken to see the Yale Rep productions of Long Day’s Journey (with Colleen Dewhurst, who was wonderful in it) and Ah, Wilderness! on consecutive nights. In the meantime, just before I left for the United States, the first draft of my Bengali adaptation of Desire Under the Elms was finished. It had started as a collaborative project with my friend, the now well-known Bengali playwright Indrashis Laharry, but it gradually became something increasingly individualized. 

What drew you to Desire Under the Elms for adaptation? 

I knew Ajitesh Banerjee had found the play interesting (or else he wouldn’t have worked on it), and I knew why when I read it and then saw it on film. There is something elementally human and universal about the play. It’s not just about Ephraim Cabot’s “frontier” mentality, his “new world” lust for land and Eben and Abbie’s lust for each other that turns into great love. The play is, beyond the immediate exigencies of plot and narrative, an exploration of the inherent love-hate relationship between human beings and the natural order of things. This is a universal theme that all cultures of the world have pondered. And in this regard, Elms is a meditation on a fundamental conundrum of human existence, cultural and historical specificities notwithstanding. This is primarily what attracted me to the play.

The other aspect—and to break down the overarching theme of existence itself, that I think also works universally in Elms—is its portrayal of the contradictory and often subversive nature of human desire and avarice, the heart making it hard for the mind to work rationally; how lust can turn into love; how true love thrives in the oddest of circumstances and finds a way to live on. On the whole, I saw in Elms an appeal for us to acknowledge the abiding resilience of the human spirit and to meditate deeply on greed and goodness, sifting between the worldly and the otherworldly. Elms pushes you toward thinking about existence in the most elemental way. It leads you to ask a series of basic questions. Why are we here? What is life? What do we want out of it? What do we live for? What is love? And any one of these questions could be reason enough for anyone to want to stage the play. And if you happen to operate in a different language and culture, it’s only natural to want to dip into the wealth of the work and find a way to import it beyond the linguistic and cultural divide and present it to a new audience. 

What else in the play do you think particularly resonated with your audience, in terms of themes, ideas or structure? 

All of what I have mentioned so far, plus the fact that it has a tight dramatic structure that tends to hold an audience’s attention. O’Neill manages the plot terrifically and the ready through-line of the narrative keeps it focused and intense. I think this resonates with any audience that sees it on stage. The Calcutta audience was no exception. Moreover, the play demands excellent acting and has at least three challenging, career-defining roles for performance. If and when it’s well acted, the play is bound to go over well with any audience. 

What changes, aside from the obvious, did you make in O’Neill’s text? How did you handle the challenge of working with the colloquial dialect of O’Neill’s plays, which is so integral to their essence and spirit? 

Well, adaptation is a very subjective undertaking. If a play in a different language works for you, it is a natural thing to want to bring it into your own native sphere, as I said earlier. That’s fine in theory. But in the actual working out of the project, one has to work out a game plan about how best to accommodate the world of the play into a different cultural world (and one that the play was not written for) without hurting the play, but at the same time, without making it look “foreign” to its target audience. And this is where adaptation gets sticky. In translation, your primary goal is fidelity to the original text, but without losing the nuances and subtleties of the original, and keeping it eminently readable in the new language. In adaptation, you are doing the same, but with the additional twist of having to create a convincing “open” secret of the fact that the text being adapted is actually taken from another language and culture. An adaptation, in other words, is always tested for both faithfulness as well as inventiveness. This makes the burden on the adapter quite onerous. The adapter, as opposed to the translator, must be brave enough to take cultural leaps that might lead to certain acts of disavowal. If translation is like a secure marriage, adaptation is more like a risky affair between two married people!

Okay, that’s plenty for an apology. Now back to your question. Having done several adaptations in my career as a playwright, I have come to rely on finding cultural equivalencies at every level as I proceed with a project. There are a few principles that one has to decide on before undertaking the project, and some that emerge as you move along with it. In Elms, one of the first principles that emerged was to find a way to preserve and find an appropriate vehicle that could uphold the inherent poetic quality of O’Neill’s recreation of the mid-nineteenth-century New England dialect. I realized that a city dialect wouldn’t do, especially since I was re-situating the play in the present (that itself was one big change!). Nor would I find any one particular rural dialect useful, because any sort of allegiance to a dialect could hinder any effort to replicate O’Neill’s lyricism. I had to keep my options open. With Elms the emphasis was squarely on making every effort at preserving the poetic, evocative quality of O’Neill’s writing (although he is supposed to have been very faithful to New England dialect in his own writing). So in the adaptation I went ahead and aimed at an “invented” dialect that drew on many Southern Bengali dialects and is recognized as a sort of “stage dialect” often used by urban performers of the Calcutta-based Bengali theatre to essentialize rural folk and their culture. My adaptation has been criticized for this use of a stage dialect; but I did it consciously with an effort to keep my pen flexible in replicating the rugged, sinewy beauty of O’Neill’s writing. And stereotypes are stereotypes only when deployed uncritically and thereby perpetuated. I don’t think Bsan Bkhamle is quite that, because although I use the “stage dialect” I do not create or perpetuate any staged stereotypes of rural folk. The essential attempt here is and always was to create an appropriate space for O’Neill to be reinvented and with justice done to his accomplishments. Now, does it work as a play? I think it does, but you’ll have to do more than simply interview me to find out for real.

In adaptations faithfulness to the original is not so much of an issue as it is with literal translations. I was more concerned with the spirit of the original, without getting caught up in the exactitude of translation. This option for creative aberration in the adaptation (which is what makes it so exciting in the first place!) allowed me to have a free hand in letting O’Neill inspire me to create a Bengali companion to each of his lines and to the subtle shades of his dialect. And as for its being colloquial, that never posed much of a problem. I just stayed within the colloquial frame of the Bengali “stage dialect,” substituting O’Neill’s dialogue with (or adding to it, when appropriate) idioms and figures of speech taken out of the vast vocabulary of the Bengali language. Bengali, you may not know, is the seventh most spoken language in the world; and, because of its syncretic history and nature it has a huge stock of words from various linguistic sources (Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Burmese, Portuguese, English, French, the aboriginal languages of our pre-Aryan past, Mongoloid languages from the northeast, etc.). In short, the language issue, once I had decided on using an artificial dialect, was not so much of a problem because I always had the option to create when there were no equivalencies available for a specific turn of phrase in O’Neill’s writing.

The other change that I made is based on a device that was used in the film version of Elms, in which Sophia Loren played Abbie. When the film was made, Loren spoke with a thick Italian accent that was incorporated into the film where she was presented as an Italian immigrant. It justified the casting choice and made it possible for the filmmaker to use Loren’s sexual (and sexualized) presence. This incidental change, I think, accentuates Abbie’s presence on Ephraim’s farm as an outsider – an Italian immigrant in the Anglo world of New England, with its own set of social and political issues. In Bsan Bkhamle, I have Abbie (or Lakm, as she is renamed in the adaptation) speak a (somewhat corrupted) city dialect. This makes room for an interesting foil to the speech patterns that characterize Iben (the Bengali Eben) and Bhdeb (the Bengali Ephraim). It expanded the range and scope of the dialogue.

Another big change, that is reflected more in the production than in the text, was the music. Although there aren’t any songs in O’Neill’s play, no Bengali play set in a rural milieu is complete without songs and music. Consequently, four songs have made their way into the performance text – one of which is traditional and the others I wrote. Two of the songs are sung by the rowdy guests at the party Bhdeb throws after Lakm has her baby. Of the other two songs – the first, a song about a lone traveler heading down life’s highway, is played as a prelude to the play in the dark theatre as the curtain rises. The second number, sung chorally by ten women, was played one verse at a time during scene breaks. This last song is based on ritual songs that rural women sing. Often these songs tell stories of how women suffer in a patriarchal society. The song I wrote for the play draws from this tradition of ritual singing, but stands its own ground in elucidating one of the parallel themes of the play that Lakm represents – how female desire is configured in a largely male world; what happens when a woman goes further than what a patriarchal social order would/could possibly allow. I don’t think O’Neill addresses this question with adequate engagement in the play. He seems to show Abbie more in the light of the Phaedra/Medea mythic analogy than as a woman of flesh and blood. And with the Greek reference rendered more or less irrelevant to the average member of a Bengali audience, I felt Abbie needed to be highlighted metatextually. I wanted the women’s issue to be more relevant in my adaptation. And this is where the song stepped in. Let me translate the first verse for you:

A woman’s life     Years of strife
Flooding banks in a torrent
Tears gather               Like clouds of pain
Tears stream              Like fiery rain
Fire redeems the fallen.

The three stanzas of the song are presented at three different moments in the play. In a way, all the songs make the play more Bengali, giving it a living connection with rural Bengali life.

O’Neill once remarked that “I never intended that the language of [Desire Under the Elms] should be a record of what the characters actually said. I wanted to express what they felt subconsciously.” What are your thoughts about that?

Realistic dramas, or should I say plays written with lifelike characters, are always meant to have realistic dialogue. In O’Neill’s case the dialogue often presents a very lyrical version of that reality, a lyricism that represents the reality of the soul. This lyricism, fortunately for me, transferred very easily into the Bengali adaptation. Bengali itself is a very poetic language with a longstanding poetic tradition, and rich with a huge vocabulary that allows for the language to be playful with itself. I know I have mentioned this before, but allow me to explain the phenomenon a little further. What I want to say is that the innate facility for words in Bengali permits anyone writing in the language to be expansive with words and expressions. It allows for a certain semantic depth and degree of latitude with expression. This inherent largesse of the Bengali language, hence, makes any kind of adaptation much easier to work through. There are numerous creative choices available for a transcreator. I found that out with O’Neill and am discovering the same thing again with Synge, who is very poetic with language too (albeit in a very different way). Also, my early familiarity with American drama, and particularly O’Neill and Elms, had prepared me sufficiently, allowing me to delve deep into the play and realize that O’Neill’s dialogue often revealed more of the subconscious than the conscious minds of his characters. This element of the play – its “essence” and the “spirit” as exposed in the dialogue that you mention – is preserved very faithfully in the Bengali adaptation.

Were you concerned with O’Neill’s reputation as an exacting taskmaster who never wanted a syllable of his texts altered?

I am glad I am not a contemporary of his! Because, contrary to O’Neill’s belief in the holy immutability of the written script, I am a believer in the profane mutability of a performance text. A good written text is fixed as a literary text as long as it remains on bookshelves. But the moment it leaves the page for the stage, it has to allow itself to change. How else would it survive the test of time? And a good written text is always one that shines through the strangest of stagings. And O’Neill’s insecurity about directors changing his “texts” was baseless because his writing always finds a way to cut through appurtenances of an inventive production, like Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams. Do you remember Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish production of Long Day’s Journey? Bergman cut all of O’Neill’s long descriptions of his New London home and only kept the center table and the ominous green lamp hanging over it, with the foghorns honking from time to time. Everything else that O’Neill so meticulously described (or should I say prescribed?) was tossed right out the window. But did that make it a less successful production? Not at all. I don’t think it was hurt in the least bit by Bergman’s choice of being frugal with the design. On the contrary, it was because of this same uncluttered set, I think, that the acting flourished and O’Neill’s lines soared higher than ever.

Can you describe a bit of the actual adaptation process? How long did it take you? What was your working environment like? Did you keep O’Neill’s text close at hand during the process, or did you refer to it at all during the actual writing?

I have adapted quite a few plays over the years, and with each one the working method has been pretty much the same. Basically, I work in three stages, with temporal gaps between them to help me gain a certain degree of objective distance in the writing. First I do a line-by-line job. In that stage, my effort is always to come up with an equivalent for each and every line that the playwright has written, with very few changes. It’s much like translating, except that I am also working out a new environment for the play and its characters. In the second stage, I go back to the adapted script with the original nearby. I read through the emerging text and “fix” things that do not seem to work—specific words, lines, cultural equivalencies. I am still referring to the original text on a need basis at this stage, but I’m also beginning to take small liberties and treat the adapted text as a stand-alone. In the third stage, I return to the adapted script and treat it as though it were an original and rework things according to its own workings, without caring so much for the source text. You see, the rigors of the first two stages allow me to plant firm roots in the original text, and as the tree of the adaptation grows, it begins to sprout new leaves. And the third stage is about shaping and trimming the new leaves, occasionally grafting a few new ones and tending to them. And this goes on until I am happy with the adaptation as an independent piece of work.

That’s what the writing part of the project entails. But then, when you get to the production stage, many other changes become necessary, mostly editorial changes, depending on what the director wants, the designer, the actors, and so on. As for the working environment—what can I say? I like to work in intense bursts. Work furiously for some time, take a break, and then return to it with renewed intensity. Back in Calcutta, in my twenties, I would typically get an adaptation done in two to three weeks, a month at the most. But things are different in the United States. First of all, I am at a cultural remove and the whole act of living in the West sort of works like the “alienation effect” and slows my responses down a bit, because I am constantly having to take myself back to a Bengali environment, recreate the milieu in my mind and work off that. And that’s not always easy, because one leads a very different life here and memories are not always available on instant recall. In fact, this problem became so troublesome at one stage in my career that I had a complete writer’s block with playwriting and did not write a play for almost eight years. But I have managed to find my way around that roadblock at long last and am writing again. In addition to that, in my late thirties, I find myself generally slower, and it also takes me longer because of all the other things that need attention in practical life. But the methodology I use is still pretty much the same. I am currently working on a Bengali adaptation of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and it’s following the same system.

What was your role in the production during its early stages?

You know, I had more or less completed the adaptation way back in 1988. When my good friend Chandan Sen, one of the best young directors in Calcutta, wanted to direct it in 2001, I had to doctor the script a bit to make it fit for production. Then I wrote the songs and, in a curious turn of events, ended up being its music director. Despite my lifelong interest in music and my skills, though unhoned, as a Bengali folk singer, I had never composed the entire soundscape for a play before. This was quite a journey of discovery. And working with the actors of Natya Anan, the producing group, many of whose young members performed the songs, was sheer pleasure. Natya Anan gave me the chance to work hands-on in Calcutta after a long hiatus. And that felt terrific. I am grateful to them.

You mentioned in our earlier conversation that rehearsals for the production continued on for over six months. Why was that?

O’Neill cannot be done in a hurry. There is always more then what’s readily visible in his plays, and the rehearsal process needs to be protracted so the actors can discover the layers and the subtext. It makes for a richer production. Moreover, Elms is a difficult play and Natya Anan and its young actors needed more time than usual to get the production to a certain level before allowing it to have an audience. At least three actresses were tried and rejected before Lakm was finally cast.

How has the production been received by both Bengali critics and the public?

It has been well received critically, and all of the three major actors have received awards for excellence. As for public approbation in terms of attendance, that is still lacking but sales are on the rise. You know, we don’t do “runs” in Calcutta as you do here. We follow the repertory style. So when a production is launched it stays in production for several years with at least two or three performances every month at various venues. We build the sets every day and strike at the end of the night. Yes, it’s a lot of work and puts serious constraints on how far we can go with the design. But that’s how it goes; a couple of shows per month, on the average. The reviews start appearing after the first couple of shows. And with each new review coming out, more people show up. It has been only nine months since the first performance, so it’s still a bit early to tell. But then, as with any serious play – and Elms is without a doubt serious – popular success is limited at best. However, there was a performance recently that, I am told, was sold out.

Discuss Ephraim Cabot’s concept of a “hard” God and his bond with the land. Is this important in the production?

The land connection continues to be important in the Bengali version, but with a twist. As Ephraim turns into Bhdeb, Ephraim’s “hard” Christian God turns into iva, the destroyer god in the supreme trinity of Hindu gods – Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver) and iva. Now, as you may know, Hinduism is not a monolithic belief-system. It is rich in many interpretations of divinity and how human beings respond to the cosmic order. In Bengal, there is a cult of iva-worshippers who believe that in every act of destruction lies the possibility of a newer creation. Although the path of iva is grueling, the believing mortal always stands to gain by facing its hardships, because it prepares him for a better afterlife. In Bsan Bkhamle, Ephraim in his metamorphosis into Bhdeb, is presented as a aivaite (follower of iva), a loner for whom the world is largely made of non-aivaite weaklings. The land for him, quite like Ephraim, is a temple in which he conducts his worship, a worship in which he has put his beliefs into practice. The difference here is that we are missing the references to the “new found land” of the Americas and the way Ephraim’s European ancestry makes him respond to it. But I don’t think the change makes the poignancy of the Bengali Ephraim’s connection to the land any less powerful. In fact, the Bengali version of this connection to the land, sans the historical “new world” connection, gets even more elemental and sharpens the thematic edge of the play.

What about Abbie’s sometimes crude sexuality? How was that dealt with?

This might well have been a problem had the production been done when the adaptation was first made, in 1988. But it’s not so much of an issue in 2002. However, the two lovers, even now, do not go very far in terms of physical intimacy; no further than embraces. There isn’t anything in the production that really disturbs the prevalent prudish norms and conventions governing the display of carnal passion on the Bengali stage. They don’t even kiss in full view.

O’Neill scholars are aware of the interest that the playwright holds for their colleagues in Indian universities, but what can you tell us about the production record of O’Neill in India today. Is he a playwright much favored by performers, directors, and audiences?

O’Neill is not a favorite among Indian directors. I cannot speak for the entire spectrum of Indian theatre because there are so many languages in the subcontinent. But as far as Bengali theatre goes, I do not know of any other O’Neill play having been done by any theatre group, be it in West Bengal or Bangladesh.

What are your thoughts on this matter of O’Neill not being, as you say, a favorite among Indian, or more especially Bengali directors, considering the respect that Indian scholars tend to have for O’Neill? Is it due to a lack of accessibility to O’Neill’s work or perhaps something else entirely?

You see, most of O’Neill’s plays have very firm roots in American culture and need to be appreciated for their particular American-ness. Their settings are often significantly different from what one would find in India. However, his works appeal to the Indian literati because of what they are, in spite of (and very possibly because of) their foreignness. O’Neill is read and appreciated in India the way any great author from any culture can be appreciated in and by outside cultures. And American writers, in general, are extremely popular in India. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, and a host of American novelists from Truman Capote through Norman Mailer, for example, are very widely read and admired in India, in English as well as in translation. But adaptation is quite another thing, particularly in the theatre. Theatre is a living art form and, unlike the novel, needs to live in a time and space that are shared with the audience. It must be consonant with the present and the fleeting. Therefore, plays that can be adapted must have some inherent echoes that go beyond the original cultural milieu of the play’s home world and resonate with the audience of the receiving culture. They have to touch human universals and not be so tightly encumbered by cultural specifics that they cannot function outside their own world. Only then can adaptation even be considered. This is a primary precondition. Unfortunately, very few of O’Neill’s plays have that sort of a resonance with Bengali culture (in my case) or Indian culture at large. But that is clearly not the case with two later masters of the American theatre. The Bengali audiences of Calcutta have seen very successful adaptations of many of Arthur Miller’s works (The Crucible, The Price, Death of a Salesman and, most recently, A View from the Bridge) and at least a couple of Tennessee Williams’ plays (The Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire). These Miller and Williams plays have worked with varying degrees of success in adaptation because they manage to speak to the Bengali condition in some touching manner and appeal to the audience as something that could well belong to their own culture. O’Neill’s work does not lend itself as much to that kind of cultural transference, Desire Under the Elms being a major exception. Part of this is circumstantial and cannot be held against O’Neill. It is a matter of cultural exigencies and a question of taste and preference on the part of the receiving culture. However, O’Neill’s plays could well be done as translations. But then, as I said earlier, our audiences would rather “own” than “borrow,” and that’s been a problem for some time now in Bengali theatre.

If you were to take on another O’Neill work for adaptation, which would you choose?

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is one of my most favorite plays. I would like to translate it into Bengali at some point for production, but I don’t know when. Also, doing it in translation is not such an attractive proposition because traditionally Bengali audiences do not take very well to translations. And there are many reasons why, which are too detailed for me to get into in this interview. But The Iceman Cometh might lend itself more readily to an adaptation and could be a more viable and practicable undertaking. Maybe I’ll get to it some day.

Afterword

As a follow-up to my interview with Chatterjee, I had the good fortune of being able to converse briefly with Basona Brikshamule’s director, Chadan Sen. Sen is a highly respected actor on the Bengali stage and is also one its most admired young directors. His rendition of Streetcar Named Desire’s Stanley (in its Bengali incarnation) catapulted him to fame. His friendship and working relationship with Sudipto Chatterjee extends back almost twenty years. Sen mentioned that he first encountered O’Neill on the page at the age of fifteen. He also discussed the challenges the play faced in rehearsal, for he was working with a young group of performers and the play itself had been attempted on the Bengali stage before with little success. He stated that Ephraim Cabot’s concept of a “hard” God and his connection with the land were among the most important elements in that particular production, for Bengali society is still semifeudal and land is a deciding factor in their cultural scenario. As he said, “Everybody wants to be a feudal lord in our society.”