The Brooklyn Rail

Irresistible, war has been drama’s muse for millennia. Its enraged origins, ferocious battles, and disastrous fallouts have made it a captivating vehicle for tragedies dating back to the Greeks. But not every wartime epic is explosive: some inhabit quieter worlds that are no less perilous.

A PlayCo commission now running at 122CC, 9 Kinds of Silence by Indian theatermaker Abhishek Majumdar posits that nationalism may be just as haunting as battlefield scars post-conscription. In a sandy office in a coastal town, Mother (Hend Ayoub) processes and rehabilitates incoming soldiers. One, Son (Joe Joseph), has sustained life-altering injuries: gouged eyes leave him blind, and war’s trauma has also laid him mute. If he will not speak and return from the war as a stable civilian, he may reflect poorly on his country. Mother will then have to assign him not a yellow card of freedom but a red one, signaling death by the state. Anxious that Son will meet an undue fate, Mother pleads with him to speak. Under authoritarian rule, however, she plasters on some glee, pokes her head out the office door, and chirps, “The government is great, of course!”

Majumdar’s language is often this bland, and there’s a lot of it, despite the peace his title suggests.

The nature of the war is also unspecific. This is partly fair enough—how many wars have been senselessly fought? The play’s setting, too, is unknown: a fictional flag hangs on the wall, which opens the play up as a universal parable about the slippery slope of nationalism. These ambiguities, however, also render 9 Kinds of Silence dramaturgically limp. Specificity yields nuance, but Majumdar’s play prefers a vague dystopia. Terms like “government,” “long war,” and “motherland” all feel as if they might be proper nouns and ever-present elements of this Orwellian world, the way Big Brother and The Party are in 1984. At least one line of dialogue—“We sleep in peace because of you”—echoes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to his soldiers, possibly casting doubt on the empty praises spoonfed to those who serve.

Mother’s office is purgatorial, and this decisiveness is well-realized. In Jian Jung’s set, gray cinder blocks box Mother and Son in and keep sunlight at bay; nevertheless, some rebellious greenery makes its way through the wall’s cracks. Lighting therein could be bleak, but Emma Deane makes it much more dynamic; her accomplished lighting design features the base dusty orange, reflecting the setting’s arid climate, but also steely purples and sickly greens when Son hears the “Song of the Nation,” triggering him to vomit.

M. Florian Staab’s sound design and original music are also integral. Mother coaxes Son to speak by playing a tape with nine types of sound as prescribed by her government-issued handbook. Featuring a “Song of Encouragement” and children’s laughter, these distract by drowning out the horrors of war—until they don’t.

At some point, the cassette skips; Mother removes it to find the tape is all jumbled. Terrified, she loses her words. Ayoub’s stomach sinks, her fear clear: such a small mistake could mean lethal punishment under dictatorial rule. That moment of utter silence, one of very few in the play, is its most harrowing.

However, not a few seconds later, Mother easily finds another tape in her desk drawer and replaces the old one. Sound resumes, tension deflates, and the play’s momentum halts. Majumdar is at his most suspenseful when leaning into the bone-chilling, hush-inducing dread of reality beyond a shared space where two people attempt to connect. However, too often 9 Kinds of Silence is marred by shapeless dialogue—“When you had left, there was a different supreme leader…And then there was the supreme contender. And now the supreme contender is the supreme leader. And there is a new supreme contender for the new supreme leader,” Mother tells Son.

Are they mother and son? She represents the motherland, he a servant of it, but they may also share a bloodline. Here, Majumdar brings in a mysticism as Mother believes a prophet is coming, perhaps in the form of her reincarnated son, lost to the war. If Son is her actual son, as she increasingly believes, then perhaps she has been processing soldiers—and the grief of her child—in a cyclical, nonstop loop.

This offers an intriguing and melancholic rumination on the undying gravity of war, and its exploration of motherhood gifts Ayoub a rich dramatic palette she eagerly paints with. Too often she repeats stage business—chewing grapes, clacking on a typewriter, looking out the window—that lose weight each time a physical motif resurfaces. Joseph, as a mostly mute soldier confined to a chair, has less to mine, though in flashes of ire or self-recollection, he transforms into a dormant volcano set to erupt.

Productions of Shakespearean and Greek war dramas are innumerable, but, recently, new stagings of other war plays have shared unique angles on military life; Leegrid Stevens’s War Dreamer at Wild Project in 2022 detailed the dual lives veterans lead as they return to a familiar society, but one unequipped to process their PTSD, and the 2020 revival of Charles Fuller’s segregation-themed A Soldier’s Play felt both reflective and prescient ahead of that year’s renewed call that Black Lives Matter. 9 Kinds of Silence, too, understands the significance of identity in storytelling: the script specifies that, wherever the play is staged, actors belonging to ethnic or racial minorities should portray the two roles. This feels important in addressing oppressive regimes, but it is never fully realized in the production given the lack of clarity in its setting; there’s a passing comment about Son praying in an unacceptable way, but the overarching rules of the tyranny are fuzzy.

A healthier harmony between direction and playwriting may have been achieved with two collaborators: Majumdar writes and helms 9 Kinds of Silence, and, sometimes, this double duty leads to imbalance. (Others who have staged their own works—as with Robert O’Hara’s Mankind and Neil LaBute’s Reasons to be Happy—have also suffered from misguided characterization or lack of dramatic heft.) Theatermaking and despotism should not be compared, but both art and politics may be improved through a greater sharing of responsibilities.