One for the mothers: A review of the play Fault Lines by Adriana Nordin Manan
I had some idea what Fault Lines was about from what playwright-producer Adriana Nordin Manan had quickly briefed me in a meeting a few months back, just enough for some promotional copy. The opening night was then my first time watching the show and learning the full extent of the Aziz family drama. While the marketing side of me felt like we completely undersold the piece, as an audience member, I was glad.
Fault Lines is a new Malaysian production, already a rarity, that is simultaneously familiar, novel, simple, yet deeply textured all at once. It is an ambitious piece which could have easily faltered, but deftly steered by director Ghafir Akbar and its solid cast of performers. The premise is simple: a Malaysian-American couple living independently in New York is visited by the Malaysian woman’s family members, and challenges abound. To begin with, Shereen (Putrina Rafie) has never disclosed to her mother her current living arrangements with David (Xavier Reminick) and a ruse is cooked up to ensure that all is Halal in Queens for one week with the family. There is more than a tinge of comedy in this snappy 2 hour production and a great deal of authenticity that makes it equally a Malaysian and a New York City tale.
Familiar Strangers
Family is the heart of the story. Fault Lines explores how families do not exist in a vacuum, and relationships are made and remade by the circumstances, desires, and beliefs held by its different members.
The Aziz family that comes visiting to New York appears to be your stock Malay, or rather Melayu, relatives that automatically invoke multiple preconceptions of the characters, of the play by the audience. This alone could have broken the play under the weight of expectations and suspicions, but Adriana has managed to carefully craft sensitive, authentic, and human personas that break out of the boxes in the audience’s minds. Their identities become a platform to understand who and what they are and endure, creating a level of complex empathy, and at times disgust, without too much melodrama.
Sabrina Hassan as Juita, outrageously gedik second wife, clearly becomes the crowd favourite as the story progresses: less a cheap laugh, more a coping mechanism. The fact that her lines were almost entirely in Malay yet managed to translate emotionally through the surtitle barrier is impressive.
The Unbridgeable
This is still a family drama, and emotions run high and tears are shed as expected. It is unfortunate that we cannot go further into its themes and the unbridgeable conflict that cleaves the family apart. Again, a topic for a different day.
Fatimah Abu Bakar’s understated incisiveness as Habsah portrays a mother at the limits of her tolerance, and in ever growing pain. Mirrored by Catherine Leyow’s short yet explosive segment as Miriam, another mother distanced by their child. In their brief moments together, without too many words exchanged, we understand how their worlds are too far apart, despite their children’s intimacy.
The play recognises the pain and struggle that each of those characters believe that they are subjected to, and where they must position themselves in the bigger scheme of things. This is especially apparent in all the mothers featured in the story, where the lead characters’ actions puncture through a lifetime of armour to reveal the women beneath.
Shereen and David’s struggles ultimately become a conduit through which an emotional and cultural reckoning takes place. The lead actors’ Putrina and Xavier’s balancing act of going in and out of the worlds of Malaysia, Queens, and Brooklyn is steady, but loses out on the expansion of these two characters.
Fault Lines explores the agency that individuals attempt to have when dealing with the gaping chasm of fear, hate, and belief. It is also an example of the nimbleness of stories well-told to both connect with and challenge audiences even here in Malaysia.
It plays one final show tomorrow at PJPAC in its debut, but surely not last, run.
