Thesis Meets Theatre: Last Lists of My Mad Mother

On 13 and 14 April, an undergraduate English thesis was performed in the form of a play. Under the guidance of Professor Mandakini Dubey, Suhaani Gala (UG’26) staged a production of Julie Jensen’s Last Lists of My Mad Mother. As lead actor and director, Gala wanted to investigate the relationship between psychoanalysis and theatre through a new lens—The play follows Dot’s descent into madness as she cares for her mother, Mallika Wavare (UG’26), suffering from Alzheimer's. Dot (Gala) struggles with her Sis, Mihika Kulkarni (UG’26), who is depicted as speaking to Dot over the telephone. The production left the audience suspended between hysterical laughter and tears. The play is a heartbreaking inversion of the mother-child relationship, driven by Ma’s deteriorating memory. 

The original script has been staged only twice; set in the 1960s in America, and contained references to the pop culture of that specific context and time. After understanding the cultural and socio-economic context of the characters, the team began to translate all  the references to their own context: “We had to do the work of adaptation so that our audience here doesn't have to do this unnecessary extra work of figuring out what they are talking about,” Gala tells The Edict. This production was set in a middle-class household in Bombay, with oblique references to parts of the city and even television shows such as ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati?’

When I entered the Black Box Theatre, what first caught my attention was the strange arrangement of the setting. The stage design was done by Anushka Navneeth (UG’27), Bhakti Naik (UG’26), Nia Chari (UG’27), Shereen Rana (UG’27), and Snigdha Dhameja (UG’27), with Andrea Fernandez (UG’26) as production manager. Rather than facing one direction, the audience sat on all four sides of the set. The setting itself was spread out, with Dot's writing table in one corner, their kitchen in another, Sis's work table in a third, and her kitchen sink in the fourth. The psychoanalytic thought was evident from the setting itself, as if the characters were pushed together yet their lives, especially Dot and her sister’s, were completely apart. Dot and her mother were always at the centre of the stage. “The sister in her imagination would always occupy the periphery, and how this ended up informing our sort of discourse on madness was that Dot and Ma are the two characters driven towards madness but are at the centre, so madness is no longer on the margins, while the most sane, desirable character is at the edges,” says Gala. What was even more disconcerting about the setting was that it allowed the actors to walk to the sides of the audience, blurring who was being watched or even psychoanalysed. 

Another element of the set design that demanded attention was the elements suspended from the ceiling. In conversation with her Ma, at times when Dot mentioned an item, it dropped on a string and remained suspended for the rest of the play, be it a bouquet, a dog collar, or a pair of oven mitts. These were especially prominent in the last scene, in which Dot and Ma are having an excitable but almost manic conversation. “(Dot) decides to join in with her mother’s madness,” says Gala when speaking of the last scene. She adds that Dot continues to remember what she wants of her mother, and the suspended objects were the most explicit literalization of the psychoanalytic framework of the play by portraying object fixation and cathexis.

Woven into the setting were visual illustrations, designed by Atharva Salve (UG’27), projected onto the stage during scene-change blackouts. These ranged from bowls of cornflakes (the only item of food that Ma is willing to eat) to her childhood bicycle, designed to evoke her attachment to her childhood through treasured objects. These visuals added to Dot’s object fixation but created a sense of impermanence and instability as well. The bright images were offset well by the lighting, done by Gopika Sunil (UG '26). What was most effective was the split scenes, in which two characters inhabit different spaces but are shown simultaneously, between Dot and her sister. The rest of the stage remained dark, with only two spots illuminating both women. 

Gala began with the question of the relationship between theatre and psychoanalysis. As both the director and the actor playing Dot, she occupied the unusual position of performer, creative lead, and thesis writer. She began with the assumption that the director played the role of the psychoanalyst. As she prepared for the play, her view changed, “The word director has this connotation of authority, of being the author with a capital. What ended up directing us most of all was the text itself. This moved the word ‘director’ out of my thesis.” She also spoke of the position the audience occupies, which can be both of the psychoanalyst observing the characters and the actors, but also of the patient being read by the performers. 

While the setting, visuals, and sound are evidence of the thoughtful embedding of the psychoanalytic framework into the play, the theoretical scaffolding would not have been illuminated without the performance of the three actors. Gala’s body language and the ease with which she spoke to the audience created laughs where there should have been tears, and tears where there should have been laughs. Wavare was an eerily convincing Ma, particularly in the scene where she insists on eating nothing except for cornflakes. Safe to say, I might never be able to eat cornflakes again. Kulkarni was perfectly irritating as Sis, just the right amount of uptight as she compulsively scrubbed the dishes and admitted her thoughts about smothering Ma, all while violently playing tennis.

(Edited by Maya Ribeiro.)