Abhishek Majumdar's KINDS OF SILENCE to Have World Premiere at PlayCo

PlayCo will present 9 Kinds of Silence, written and directed by Abhishek Majumdar. A PlayCo commission from the celebrated Bangalore and Abu Dhabi-based playwright and director, 9 Kinds of Silence runs September 7–October 8, 2023 at 122CC’s Second Floor Theatre (150 First Ave). The production opens officially on September 18. 

9 Kinds of Silence is set in a military tent on the shore of a country that is winding down a multi-year war. The play is the story of a Mother who works for the homeland on intake for returning soldiers, and a Son returning from combat. We don't know if they are mother and son, we don't know their political beliefs. We do know that they have to discover, over the course of one night, the language to describe to each other what they've seen in the years the war has raged on in the name of nationalism, and a dictator—who operates a democracy meant to preserve an illusion of freedom—has arisen. 9 Kinds of Silence deals with sound and silence as means of protest, control, and subjugation. Majumdar explores our need, as nation states, to invent new enemies, and the extreme cost of nationalism that forces us to speak its language in a world where human silence is the last resort of authentic humanity. 

Palestinian-Israeli actress Hend Ayoub (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on Broadway, First Down, A Thousand Splendid Suns), who played the role of the Mother in an earlier PlayCo workshop of the play, returns in this world premiere production; she is joined by actor and musician Joe Joseph (The Kite Runner and The Band’s Visit on Broadway, Merrily We Roll Along) as the Son. The creative team includes Jian Jung (Set and Costume Designer) Emma Deane (Lighting Designer), and M. Florian Staab (Composer and Sound Designer).

After teaching a course at NYU Abu Dhabi called Silence, and after directing a wordless film adapted from Ōta Shōgo’s The Water Station, Majumdar found himself wanting to complete what was becoming an unofficial trilogy around the idea of silence. In writing 9 Kinds of Silence, he revisited elements of classical forms he’d studied—such as Kathakali, Koodiayattam and Noh Theater—to explore nonverbal themes in his own work in a new, contemporary context. 

Majumdar’s politically and emotionally vital works have been produced on stages across numerous countries, and translated into several languages. While his playwriting brought him around the world, Majumdar noticed following the 2008 financial crisis how nationalism was fomenting all over—and how disinformation in the many places he visited distorted understandings of the rest of the world. 

Majumdar recalls that when he was in China researching for his play Pah-La—“a raw, real and relentless look at the Tibetan insurrection and nonviolence” (The Times of India)—he read Chinese newspapers in English, which gave the impression that America’s collapse could happen any given moment. When soon after he arrived in America, he found that American papers indicated China’s collapse was imminent. The din of nationalism, the filters it casts over reality and its erosion of nuanced thought and politics, became a subject he wanted to explore on a universal level—since it was, in fact, so universally overtaking the world. 

“I wanted to write towards creating a kind of modern myth, with elements that are common to experiences in many places,” says Majumdar. Rather than base 9 Kinds of Silence on a particular place, Majumdar in his script calls for its two characters to be “from a minority community, wherever the play is performed” and for the sound to be devised based on the national anthem of a given production’s home country.

This noise emanating from all parts of the globe likewise drove Majumdar to consider the importance of silence as a primal form of communication. He explains, “Because of the rise of nationalism and democratic dictatorships around the world, people everywhere are having to conform to languages that are acceptable within their given country and whatever patriotism sounds like there. A major part of what we are losing in this surge of the right wing is the dignity we used to have in silence; of silent protest; silent thought. Family dinners used to have beautiful moments of silence, but suddenly due to this polarization everything becomes the sound of language for or language against—language that has no originality. Online, language is reduced to a given amount of characters and churned out without pause. We are losing silence, one of the primal ways in which we understood the world—and I wanted to look at nationalism through that lens, as a loss of something primal.”

The interplay of noise and silence is paralleled by Majumdar’s exploration of the constructed nature of nations and borders (the playwright and director notes the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, hurriedly planned in five weeks by an Englishman who had previously never spent any time there) against the primal relationship that exists between parents and children. Throughout the play, he nods to how nations self-referentially manipulate the language of paternal-and-maternalism to forge blind trust, loyalty, and obedience.

Commissioned by PlayCo and developed in part via a workshop in New York, 9 Kinds of Silence speaks to the organization’s commitment to sparking international dialogue around theater and presenting theater from America and around the world to New York audiences. It will be followed, in January 2024, by PlayCo and WP Theater’s co-production of Corinne Jaber’s Munich Medea: Happy Family at WP Theater (4th floor, 2162, Broadway, New York), reuniting PlayCo with acclaimed director Lee Sunday Evans, who staged their productions of Christopher Chen’s Caught and Stefano Massini’s Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya.

About Abhishek Majumdar

Abhishek Majumdar is a playwright, scenographer, and director working in India and internationally. His work has been produced and commissioned in leading theaters of the world including Royal Court Theatre London, Prithvi Theatre Mumbai, Ranga Shankara Bangalore, Deutsch Shauspielhaus Hamburg, Ruhrfest Recklinghausen, Théâtre du Soleil Paris, National Theatre London, San Francisco Opera, PEN World Voices, Internacionale Dramaturgie Festival Buenos Aires and PlayCo New York amongst others. He is a recipient of multiple awards including the International Theatremakers award New York, Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award Delhi, The Shankar Nag Rangakarmi Award Bangalore, the Toto Funds the Arts Award, Segal Center Award for Civic Engagement in the Arts, Best Director in London Movie Awards, Best Director 8 and Hal/ Film Festival (Rome) Awards amongst others. He works in Theater, Film and Opera. His book of essays, Theater Across Borders is published by Bloomsbury International as part of the Theatermakers series and he has been published, performed and translated in Hindi, English, French, German, Czech, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Kashmiri, and Spanish. He is the Artistic Director of Nalanda Arts Studio Bangalore and creative producer at New Voices Arts Project based in Bangalore. He is also Associate Professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi and the Program head of the Theater Program.

  

About Hend Ayoub

Hend Ayoub (Mother) is a New York-based actor and writer. Theatre credits include: Broadway’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams, as well as its previous run at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum; A Thousand Splendid Suns (Arena Stage); Kiss(Yale Repertory Theatre); First Down's world premiere at NYC's 59E59 Theater, American Fast's world premiere(InterAct Theater) and Veils (world premiere, Portland Stage; Barrington Stage). Television credits include Homeland, Orange Is The New Black, The Looming Tower, Madam Secretary, Royal Pains, Feed the Beast, The Accidental Wolf, Comedy Central’s The Watch List, and recurring roles on Transparent andDamages. In Film, she co-starred in the Emmy Award-winning film Death of a President and the multi award-winning film Private. She can be seen in the new upcoming film If You See Something. Hend is currently workshopping an autobiographical solo show, HOME?, about being a Palestinian born and raised in Israel.

About Joe Joseph

Joe Joseph (Son). Broadway: The Kite Runner, The Band’s Visit. Off-Broadway: The Fears, Merrily We Roll Along, Loveless Texas, Baghdaddy, Genet Porno. 

About the Creative Team 

Jian Jung (Set and Costume Designer) from Korea. Jung’s design has been acclaimed as ‘innovative’, ‘inventive’, ‘genius’ and ‘spectacular’ by major press such as The New York Times. While her productions range from classic masterpieces to new plays, her design always focuses on innovative delivery of the piece, provoking audience’s expectations. Jung recently designed The Nosebleed by Aya Ogawa at Lincoln Center Claire Tow Theater and Woolly Mammoth Theater (DC), Ocean Filibuster at A.R.T (Boston), Kiss at Wilma Theater (Philadelphia), and Bodies They Ritual at the Wild Project with Clubbed Thumb. Other theater work has been in many NYC theaters including CSC, ART/NY, HERE, The Kitchen, Bushwick Starr, Abrons, Theater Row, Soho Rep, Target Margin, and Mabou Mines, Her international work has been in Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Korea. Her opera and musical work have been in Bard Fisher Center, Juilliard School, Wolf Trap Opera (VA), Long Beach Opera (CA), and Huntington Theater (Boston). Jung received Edith Lutyens & Norman Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Award for Aya Ogawa’s Ludic Proxy, and was nominated for Henry Hewes Design Award for Haruna Lee’s Suicide Forest. Her design in Venezuela was presented in Prague Quadrennial 2015. Jung received an MFA in Theater Design from NYU, and an MFA in Environmental Design from Ewha Women’s University in Korea, where she was born and grew up. She teaches at NYU Tisch Design and Sarah Lawrence College.

Emma Deane (Lighting Designer) is an Indigenous lighting designer, and a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. Recent credits: Confederates (Signature Theatre NYC); Trouble in Mind (Hartford Stage); Peter Pan and Wendy (Kansas City Rep); On the Far End, Jennifer Who is Leaving (Round House Theatre); Three Sisters (Two River Theater); BAKKHAI (Baltimore Center Stage); Queen of Basel (TheaterWorks Hartford); Jane Eyre (Geva Theatre Center). Additional credits: New York Theater Workshop, St. Louis Rep, Yale Repertory Theater, The Fisher Center, Court Theatre, The Goodman, Steppenwolf Theater Company, Northlight Theatre, and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. MFA - Yale School of Drama. USA 829.

M. Florian Staab (Composer and Sound Designer) based in Brooklyn, NY. Staab was born and raised in Germany and received a BA from Oberlin College and MFA from UIUC/Krannert Center. He is an associate artist with Sinking Ship Productions and teaches at Playwrights Horizons Theater School. His designs have been heard at The Public Theater, Irish Repertory Theatre, Harlem Stage, Trinity Repertory Company, City Theatre Pittsburgh, Center Theatre Group, Mint Theater Company, Pearl Theatre Company, The Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Drama League, New Saloon, Chicago Opera Vanguard and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Staab is a recording and mixing engineer and designs sound for narrative fiction podcasts. He also recently directed Bill Irwin’s On Beckett / In Screen for the camera.

About PlayCo

PlayCo (Kate Loewald, Founding Producer, and Robert G. Bradshaw, Executive Producer) is an Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway theater. PlayCo produces adventurous new plays from the U.S. and around the world, to advance a dynamic global experience of contemporary theater and expand the voices and perspectives represented on U.S. stages.

PlayCo has produced 42 new plays from the United States, Central and South America, Europe, Russia, South and East Asia, and the Middle East. PlayCo’s distinctive international programming links American theatre with world theater, American artists with the global creative community, and American audiences with a whole world of plays. Previous productions include Sarah Einspanier's acclaimed Lunch Bunch, Ebru Nihan Celkan's Will You Come With Me?, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’ wry and wrenching Recent Alien Abductions, Lee Sunday Evans’ New York Times Critics’ Pick production of Stefano Massini’s Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya, Amir Nizar Zuabi’s This Is Who I Am and the sold-out Oh My Sweet Land, Guillermo Calderón’s Villa, Christopher Chen’s Caught (Obie Award for Playwriting, 2017), Kyle Jarrow & Lauren Worsham’s The Wildness, Debbie Tucker Green’s generations, Aya Ogawa’s Ludic Proxy, Antonio Vega’s Django in Pain and The Duchamp Syndrome, and more.

PlayCo's office space on the island known as Mannahatta (Manhattan), and the rehearsal and performance spaces we use throughout New York City are located in Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people.

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