The play Ganesh vs the Third Reich has had Hindus protesting in Australia.
Bureau Report
NEW YORK: A controversial play by Australia’s leading independent theater company, ‘Ganesh vs the Third Reich,’ which opened in New York, and is set to tour some other cities in the United States, has garnered rave reviews, but Hindu groups may rise up to protest against it, as has happened in the past.
The play rated as 5 stars by The Age newspaper of Australia, and termed as “courageous, confronting, intelligent and magisterially considered theatre,” revolves around the elephant-headed god Ganesh traveling through Nazi Germany to reclaim the Swastika, an ancient Hindu symbol. A story-within-a-story, the play also analyses the actors themselves begin to feel the weighty responsibility of storytellers and question the ethics of cultural appropriation, according to backtobacktheatre.com, the creator of the play.
Cleverly interwoven in the play’s design is the story of a young man inspired to create a play about Ganesh, god of overcoming obstacles. He is an everyman who must find the strength to overcome the difficulties in his own life, and defend his play and his collaborators against an overbearing colleague.
The show is made before our very eyes and takes on its own life. It invites us to examine who has the right to tell a story and who has the right to be heard. It explores our complicity in creating and dismantling the world, human possibility and hope, said BacktoBack.
The New York Times gave a favorable review of the play which opened this year’s Under the Radar festival of experimental theater, with critic Ben Brantley saying it “never lets you settle into passive acceptance of anything it does. It’s a vital, senses-sharpening tonic for theatergoers who feel they’ve seen it all.”
The review points out that all but one of its five cast members are what is described in the script as “intellectually disabled.”
The Times review says “Ganesh” reveals itself to be about the nature and abuses of power, big and small. “The show doesn’t draw simplistic parallels between a stage director and a führer. But it reminds us of how the urge to control can warp in different ways. The power games that are played in rehearsals here aren’t exclusive to David. The actors show cruelty, in ways subtle and crude, to one another also.”
Manu Joseph, the editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People,” writing about the play in The New York Times, points out that when “Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, ” was staged in Australia in 2011, Hindus there protested, claiming to be wounded by the comic representation of the elephant-headed god, the length of whose trunk is used in one scene to allude to a vital male organ.
Some Hindu groups in the United States, “whose antennas often seem as if they are finely tuned to seek offense, are now contemplating how they should react to such a play in a land where complaints on religious grounds are largely subordinate to artistic freedom,” he says.
Speaking to Joseph, Sheetal Shah, a senior director at the Hindu American Foundation, says that there was a distinction between American Hindus who were born and raised in India and those whose formative memories are in the United States. It is those in the former group who feel compelled to react to Indian politics, she said. The latter tend to be less interested in politics, but just as passionate about Hinduism and India.
“I am not clear about our course of action, in its regard,” said Shah.
The play travels to some other cities outside of New York City. It will be staged on January 18-19 at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; January 24-27 at the Centre for the Art of Performance UCLA, Los Angeles; and January 31st-February 2, at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Maine.