Can magic illuminate a life that was removed from magical?
Cahoots NI, a youngsters’s theater firm from Belfast, Northern Eire, incorporates illusions into “The Vanishing Elephant,” a present that goals to dazzle audiences 8 and older whereas additionally exposing them to the tough realities of wildlife captivity and human struggling. Though the outcomes are generally blended, this alluring spectacle makes highly effective statements in regards to the rights of each animals and folks.
Offered by the New Victory Theater at Stage 42 (the theater’s common house is present process renovation), the manufacturing introduces its title character’s start in Bengal, on the Indian subcontinent, with a glowing particular impact: a hand-held clear field fills with mild, revealing a mechanized shadow puppet that raises its trunk beguilingly. Written by Charles Way, the play doesn’t point out the interval, however grownup theatergoers will acknowledge this because the period of Britain’s crushing rule of India.
Whereas the elephant continues to be very younger, hunters tear her from her mom. Although she wins the love of Opu, a younger villager (performed as a boy by Adi Chugh and as an growing old man by Cliff Samara), he can’t cease a coach (Madhav Vasantha) from treating her roughly. Opu, who names the elephant Janu, is in some ways her counterpart: a lonely, misunderstood orphan adopted by foreigners (in his case, an English couple). Solely he and, later, one other little one understand that Janu is “a factor of marvel.”
That additionally describes her onstage. Helen Foan, of the corporate Foan & Fortune, designed the life-size puppets that painting Janu after the opening scene. Grey-suited puppeteers primarily disappear as they manipulate these segmented kinds, creating the impression that an actual elephant, with unhappy eyes and a dusty trunk, is transferring simply toes away.
The solid members, who additionally narrate, execute their roles and Jayachandran Palazhy’s choreographed motion expertly, although it feels jarring to see Opu’s adoptive father, an imperious colonialist, be performed by a Black man. The identical actor, Ola Teniola, later offers a stirring efficiency as Jarrett, a harried American circus employee who takes cost of Janu after a rich lady (Shanara Gabrielle) transports her to america. Compelled to coach the elephant, now renamed Jenny, for the brutalities of the large prime, Jarrett lastly declares: “You aren’t meant to be right here. Like I used to be by no means meant to be right here.”
Utilizing skillful sleight of hand, solid members arrange the circus, showing to tug tall poles and a whole ladder from a small case. In a departure from Jenny’s unhappy state of affairs, the encompassing music and crowd noise construct a festive environment. (Aoife Kavanagh is the manufacturing’s sound designer; she and MD Pallavi are its composers.) Circuses, after all, will be jubilant occasions, however the manufacturing, which is directed by Paul Bosco Mc Eneaney, veers towards contrived romanticism when it depicts a saintly Jenny placing her tormentors’ security above her personal.
Impressed by the story of the true elephant that Harry Houdini made disappear in his New York act in 1918, the present lastly locations Jenny onstage with that well-known magician. Her arduous journey, and people of the play’s Black coach and South Asian characters, would appear to ask somber reflection about freedom and its loss reasonably than a Bollywood-style finale. The rousing music and joyful choreography threaten to make Jenny vanish once more, simply when she’s turn into indelible.
The Vanishing Elephant
By Oct. 29 at Stage 42, Manhattan; newvictory.org. Operating time: 1 hour 10 minutes.
