Additional Resources – Jesus in India

A few words from Shirley Fishman, dramaturg for Jesus in India

I first heard Lloyd Suh’s Jesus in India last summer when Loretta Greco invited me to a reading at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City. Loretta had spoken to me about the play and my possible involvement as a dramaturg. I had seen American Hwangup and also a reading of another play of his, and I was struck by the growing sense of theatrical “play” in his work. As serendipity would have it, I was on a week’s vacation in New York and was able to attend. A wonderful group of young actors, directed by Daniella Topol, gave voice to a remarkably inventive and wonderfully contemporary speculation on an ancient story with an infamous gap—that of Jesus Christ and the lost years between his nativity and ministry.

I found the play funny, irreverent, surprising and delightfully smart in its conceit, but it took me a while to place where the play lived in terms of theme and content. After the reading, we all talked about our responses. Since I was the newest addition to the group, all turned to me for my thoughts. What I said had hardly formed in my mind, but quietly slipped from my lip—“Oh, it’s a play about becoming.” I thought of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts I and II in which Prince Hal must leave his youthful exploits behind in order to bring honor to his father and earn the right to kingship. In Lloyd’s play, Jesus is on a similar hero’s journey—one that will change much of the world for all time.

In Jesus in India, Jesus rebels against the ongoing strife in Judea under the yoke of Roman occupation, but also the inevitability of his fate as told to him by his father. At the moment when Jesus tells his friend Abigail to let his mother know that he is “lost,” he means to communicate that he cannot be found. But we know, as he does not, the true depth of what he has said. As he abandons himself to a new, exotic world, he awakens to earthly, sensory and ideological delights that offer refuge and respite from burdens left behind. But dreams, visitations and visions, at once exhilarating and terrifying, point to a confrontation with destiny.

Since that first reading I attended in New York, Jesus in India has been in its own process of “becoming.” Lloyd has developed, ever so smartly and thoughtfully, the nascent bare bones of his play, deepening the inner lives of his characters with wants and desires that connect so directly to our own. With inventive scenes that sparkle with originality in language, song and image, he takes us on a remarkable journey that is theatrically bold and deeply moving in its imagining of the greatest story never told.

Shirley Fishman
Dramaturg