Literature and Life in Anuvab Pal’s Chaos Theory
By Shanti Wesley

If a full production of Anuvab Pal’s Chaos Theory is as witty and moving as the bare bones reading I attended this week, it will be a rare treat for theatergoers. Tracing the lives of Sunita and Mukesh over 35 years, from graduate school to professorships, from Delhi to Cambridge and New York, Pal confidently tackles the abstractions of literary theory and identity politics, while also presenting a detailed, intimate portrait of two intelligent, complicated individuals.

Aasif Mandvi skillfully balances Mukesh’s intellectual bravado and emotional diffidence. A “Bengali with a colonial hangover,” Mukesh is overly confident in his academic opinions yet too hesitant to declare his feelings to Sunita. When Sunita tells him that she’s leaving Delhi to pursue further study in the U.S., Mandvi subtly expresses Mukesh’s own surprise at the depth of his attachment to her.

Rita Wolf’s Sunita is fiercely intelligent and inquisitive, searching for something she can’t quite define all her life – connection? belonging? – from India to the U.S. and back again. Wolf nicely captures the young Sunita’s passion for her subject matter and bold sense of adventure, balancing them with her emotional reticence when it comes to Mukesh. Later in the play, however, Wolf’s reading feels slightly superficial because she doesn’t seem to fully embody the older Sunita’s dissatisfaction with marriage and academia.

Over the course of the play, Mukesh and Sunita dance around their feelings for each other and into unsatisfying relationships with other people - Mukesh with the vapid Elizabeth (a lazily-written, one-note character), and Sunita with the pretentious Amit (Rajesh Bose, managing to imbue an otherwise farcical character with humanity). I found that the “date unsuitable people to make the person you really love jealous” storyline a bit too clichéd for nuanced, finely-etched characters like Sunita and Mukesh, and the one-dimensional characters of Elizabeth and Amit detract from the play.

Another minor weakness is Sunita’s sudden investment in gender roles when it comes to her teenage son. From someone who often seems uncomfortable with the societal expectations placed on her, especially around marriage, Sunita’s vehement insistence that her teenage son be more “masculine” (why doesn’t he read more porn and less Proust, she wonders), rowdier, and less intellectual is a bit puzzling. It may be a reaction against what she perceives as her own insulated existence as an academic, but since Pal doesn’t adequately contextualize Sunita’s attitude here, it is oddly out of character.

Overall, though, Chaos Theory is a satisfying play, rich with witty critiques of the literary scene and academia. The playwright takes a few shots at authors on the magic realism bandwagon who exoticize South Asian identity and writing. Sunita laments what she sees as the trap of post-colonial studies - it’s not about what you know, but where you’re from: Sunita and Mukesh may be experts in their fields of English literature, but they won’t be recognized as such because they’re brown; they may know nothing about Indian literature, but, because they’re from India, the academic establishment will assume that they do and grant them status and recognition in that field based on their ethnic identity.

It’s a sign of the play’s strength that these theoretical musings co-exist comfortably with Sunita’s and Mukesh’s personal stories. Anuvab Pal ably juxtaposes literature and life when Mukesh compares Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing with Romeo and Juliet. The former couple shares a truer passion, Mukesh claims, because it’s a meeting of minds, a deep friendship, more satisfying than the latter couple’s melodramatic romance. Pal clearly presents Mukesh and Sunita in the Benedick-Beatrice mold, thus highlighting the play’s central premise - that the big ideas of literature and art are interwoven with the intimate realities of individual lives.