Projects

Jumbled Heads

I have directed Girish Karnad’s delightful play Hayavadana twice, once in 1973 and again in 1985. The first attempt was by far the more satisfying and it is that which I will briefly discuss here. Summer outdoor free theatre has always been popular on the Michigan State campus, perhaps because the wether in that part of the country is so dreadful most of the year.

On a shoestring budget and a large outdoor platform stage surrounded on three sides by bleachers we elected to produce The Jumbled Heads, retitled by the Director of Production because he felt Hayavadana would not have any commercial appeal. The production was based on research done on rural genres of performance in India during my 1969-70 field trip.

The story is a good one. An enthusiastic critic for the Michigan State News, July 13, 1973, wrote that the play was, “clever, original and hilarious; childish and obvious, yet filled with such poetry, insights and felling that it proves totally disarming.” Devadatta and Kapila are best friends. Both are in love with Padmini. Devadatta is a fair skinned, bookish intellectual who is physically weak. Kapila is dark-skinned, handsome, athletic and a bit dimwitted. Padmini likes them both but eventually decides to marry Devadatta. The three remain friends even after the marriage. On a journey through a dark forest, the men each go independently to the temple of Kali to pray. Kapila, concluding that he is the odd man out in the threesome, decides to sacrifice himself to the goddess and cuts off his head. Seeing what his friend has done, Devadatta follows suit. When Padmini finds both men dead she calls out to the goddess and picks up the knife. Jast as she is about to decapitate herself Kali awakens from her sleep. The blood-thirsty goddess is not too pleased by what she sees before her and advises Padmini to replace the heads on the bodies and get on with her life. In the dark chamber of the sanctum sanctorum, Padmini lifts the heads but puts them on the wrong bodies.

So now who is the husband and who the best friend? You might have already guessed. Padmini chooses the handsome man with the brilliant intellect to take her home. Both of them leave the other man to find his way out of the forest on his own. In time, the men begin to transform into their original shapes. Realizing that she has made a terrible mistake, Padmini throws herself into the sacrificial fire. The play contains a bookend story adapted from a folk tale about a man who has the head of a horse and the body of a man. Eventually, he prays to Ganesh to “fulfill” him. So Ganesh does just that and turns him into a horse!

The work has been successfully performed by Julie Taymor at Lincoln Center as The Transposed Heads, titled after Thomas Mann’s novello of the same name which was inspired by stories told the novelist by Heinrich Zimmer. Karnad found the tale while studying at Oxford and wrote Hayavadana. In 1985 we produced it on our newly constructed Festival Stage at the Wharton Center for the Performing Arts on the East Lansing campus. Although beautifully designed and executed, the play did not have the intimacy or the life of the 1973 version. Many of the performers of that original show went on to solid professional careers in theatre and dance, proving that some transformations are possible, after all.