A Maximalist Show Needs a Collective Mindset

The play Fifty Boxes of Earth is about a queer immigrant trying to plant literal and metaphorical roots in a new land despite a distrusting neighbor. It’s also a braid—according to its playwright Ankita Raturi—made of Western theatre, non-Western choreography, and puppetry. This intention created such a definitive vision during its world premiere at Theater Mu in St. Paul, Minnesota in March that some critics wondered how this play could be performed any other way, with any other collaborators.

However, Raturi created a deliberately open-ended text so that the story could map onto any community, any culture, and any time.

To stage Fifty Boxes for Theater Mu’s Asian American community, Raturi, director kt shorb, choreographer Ananya Chatterjea, and puppet co-designers Oanh Vu and Andrew Young led with a mindset of collectivism, deep collaboration, and a spirit of devising even in a scripted process. When the play is hopefully produced again in the future, this model will hold the key to creating a specific world each time.

As Raturi writes in the show's program note, "This is a maximalist play…We must approach the stage therefore from a collectivist mindset, and not a scarcity mindset. Its real estate, both physical and emotional, must be shared between creative abundances."

Raturi and Theater Mu’s marketing and communications director Lianna Matt McLernon discuss this in the following conversation.

What makes Fifty Boxes of Earth a maximalist play is the fact that it doesn't rely on one form or aspect to do the work. The dance is as essential as the words. And the puppetry is as essential as the props and the set.

Lianna Matt McLernon: What makes Fifty Boxes of Earth a maximalist show? And why did you create it like that?

Ankita Raturi: I was talking to someone recently, and they were interpreting maximalism as expensive, so I want to be clear about what I mean by maximalism. What makes Fifty Boxes of Earth a maximalist play is the fact that it doesn't rely on one form or aspect to do the work. The dance is as essential as the words. And the puppetry is as essential as the props and the set. We can't tell the story without integrating what I see as kind of three traditions in a Western dramaturgy and one tradition in a non-Western dramaturgy.

Western dramaturgy is very different than what I feel pulled to and feel natural in, South Asian dramaturgy, where the forms are not distinct. But I also think in terms of maximalism, that’s a South Asian aesthetic. If you look at South Asian fashion and you look at South Asian architecture and you look at South Asian life and food and just anything, it's bursting always with color, with pattern, with flavor.

To me, maximalism is the aesthetic of the play. It's the formal weaving of the structure of the play, and it's the fact that even as I trim content down to the essential, I'm never trying to take anything away from the form.

The goal for the play is to be produced multiple ways in multiple cities with multiple, different histories mapped onto it through casting, and through the choice of dance style, and the choice of puppetry style. But the fact that it is maximalist in both form and aesthetic, to me, makes it a South Asian play, no matter who is inside of it.

I don't think you need a million dollars. I don't think you need this huge space and this huge stage necessarily. But you do need everyone on the team to be willing to work in maybe a slightly different way than a traditional Western play.

Lianna: How did you see this in praxis during rehearsals?

Ankita: We were maybe like a week into rehearsal, and we had been a little separated. We'd been having table work happening in one room, and choreography happening in another room, and puppet designers still crafting puppets in their own workshop, and there was this day everyone was just done with being on their own.

The original goal that day had been, I think, to be able to place the five major puppets that would populate the protagonist Q's garden plot in the rehearsal room, and to be able to place the actor inside of that, and to be able to place the choreographers around that. But it turned into: Here's one of the puppet artists and the set designer and the director and the stage manager figuring out placement of something. And here is the choreographer teaching an actor—not a dancer, but an actor (although an actor who can definitely move)—some movement, because they're going to have to come through the dancers at the beginning. And then here are the dancers, rehearsing a thing that they just learned on their own. And we're kind of all on top of each other.

The sound designer and composer, Katharine Horowitz, was in rehearsal with us multiple days in a row, just the entire rehearsal, which is not normal. We couldn't have achieved the precision of the sound in the choreography that we did without Kat being in the room with us as much as she was. It is composition that is following from dance, rather than the dance that is following from composition, which is an interesting thing in a Western context, but in a South Asian context is very normal—like the music and dance relationship is extremely bi-directional. What was amazing about Kat was that she was able to jump in and figure out how to operate that way in a pretty short amount of time with a lot of time constraints and make something really beautiful at the end of it

Another example: Oanh Vu and Andrew Young, puppet co-designers, talked a lot about the fact that in a lot of puppet traditions across cultures, one of the main goals of the puppeteer is to be invisible. Whereas the goal here in Fifty Boxes of Earth was not at all for the dancer to disappear, but to be one with the puppet or to encourage the puppet or to die with the puppet. It was important to see the puppet fully and see the dancer fully. And so it's a change in mindset for both teams in that collaboration, because you are manipulating something that is alive, and you are alive.

Lianna: Was there ever an explicit conversation of "this is how we're all going to collaborate" or did things naturally unfold?

Ankita: There was a clear expectation from the beginning that was verbalized about how much coordination would be needed and how much collaboration would be needed between departments.

And I think what really makes it work is the fact that after all that conversation, everyone was willing to go with the flow a little bit and adapt in the moment and be like, “Okay, this is what seems to be working” in terms of a mode of collaboration.

We were experimenting with very building block elements in a way that I think the traditional rehearsal process doesn't always. And you can't do that exploration in this play until you have a lot of those people actually in the room working towards production.

Lianna: How did this intense collaboration shape the culture of the rehearsal room?

Ankita: It was a very curious and generous culture, which I have to give the director, kt shorb, all the credit for. kt also says something a lot that I think people had in mind: "Hold on tightly, let go lightly." It is a really lovely ethos because it allows everyone to put forth their best ideas and have to justify them, and it also allows the room to keep moving.

There's a way in which working this collaboratively pulls back the curtain for everyone on everything—and it's another way that feels a little bit like devising.

There's this play that I recently saw called Counting and Cracking that's made by a Sri Lankan Australian devising duo about a family who had to flee Sri Lanka for Australia. Obviously every production is a collaboration, but you can see when you're watching it that their process went beyond that to a kind of co-creation shared by the full cast and creative team. Those ideas could not have just been in one person's brain and written down and directly staged—it just never would have been the show that it was.

There are things that only happen when you read a play and then you direct it, a kind of classic playwright-director collaboration. And then there are things that only happen when you devise and everyone generates content together. And Fifty Boxes of Earth hopefully lives somewhere between those two things.

Lianna: In your program note, you mention that you hoped the collective mindset in the rehearsal room could be a model for the rest of the world, and the play is already so relevant as it fights against transphobia and xenophobia. Is there anything more you want to say about this?

Ankita: I already feel different as a person than I did when I wrote that program note because the world has been moving so fast. And so evolutions that you would go through over a year as a person happen in days right now. I think I'm more scared today than I was when I wrote my program note.

There's two things that could be about. And one is what I just said, which is that things move so fast, and it's such an onslaught of bad news, and none of it is surprising. The other one is that I'm not in the room with this play every day.

I do think that being so involved with this play protected me from some amount of the onslaught every day. Because every day, I got to come to rehearsal or tech and engage in this process of making this show that is so full of life, a garden that is thriving.

It’s a solace to work on something that lets me dream of something else, dream of a world that I want to live in. To do that in community with other people that are dreaming, to every day be surrounded by people who are nonbinary or trans or immigrants or children of immigrants, is powerful.

Yeah, it is relevant to the times that we find ourselves in, and it's relevant to many cycles of history in the past and many cycles of history in the future. But it's a solace to work on something that lets me dream of something else, dream of a world that I want to live in. To do that in community with other people that are dreaming, to every day be surrounded by people who are nonbinary or trans or immigrants or children of immigrants, is powerful.

It meant that the news was something I could get past, or it's something that we would all be able to fight. To not be in that room every day, that's when it can get to you. I think that's when you can start to believe the worst of what's possible. So someone please produce this play so that I can get back in the room and be brave again.