Sympathy for the Pharaoh? A Jewish-Indian play asks us to find a soft spot for an old enemy
Kalamandalam John wearing the traditional makeup for Ravana, in which he will perform as the Pharoah. Photo by Shafer Artbeatz
By PJ Grisar March 12, 2024
Misha Shulman has been working on his play Pharaoh, about the villain from Exodus, for over a decade. When he speaks with people about it he gets a curious response.
“Most people, I tell them, ‘Well the play focuses a lot on Pharaoh and his son’ and they say ‘Oh, I didn’t realize Pharaoh had a son,’” said Shulman, a playwright, performer and the rabbi for the New Shul.
“We’re missing certain obvious details about other people’s humanity for the sake of the story that we feel comfortable telling.”
The death of Pharaoh’s son in the 10th Plague, which killed every firstborn son in Egypt, is the inciting incident of Shulman’s show, which he at first performed as a solo piece. For a new production coming March 15 to Theater For the New City in Manhattan, Shulman will continue to lend his voice to Pharaoh, Moses (stammering, of course) and a litany of other characters, but physicalizing the drama will be Kalamandalam John, a master of Kathakali, an Indian theatrical dance form. (A previous production scheduled for 2020 was cancelled due to the 11th plague: the novel coronavirus.)
In a rehearsal, John, in socks and a navy Nike tracksuit, pantomimed sprouting boils, while a sitar player worked out the sound of the sixth plague’s oozing lesions. Shulman suggested it be higher pitched. Up an octave, with an unpleasant twang, somehow the sitarist finds the sound of a God-sent skin disease.
If it’s unconventional in the Jewish tradition to sympathize with Pharaoh, Shulman’s staging, directed by Michael Posnick and accompanied by sitar and percussion, takes a cue from another tradition entirely: the Sanskrit theater form of Kudiyatam.
In 2008, Shulman was in Muzhikulam, in Southern India, to see the 15-day play Asokavanikangam, about Ravana, the antagonist of the epic poem the Ramayana and a kind of Hindu supervillain. Shulman spoke with the actor, Margi Madhu, after the performance and, when he asked Madhu what he thought the play was about, was surprised to hear him say “love.”
Shulman was inspired to create a piece from the perspective of one of Judaism’s main bad guys and the love he has for his son. This Pharaoh is still a tyrant, but he is also used to diagnose issues Shulman has with monotheism and religion in general when it claims a monopoly on the truth.
When Moses tells Pharaoh about his one true God, he responds “All I enslave are your bodies. You want to enslave minds, hearts.”
Shulman says the cheshbon nefesh — or accounting of the soul — of the show is about how religious people, Jews included, draw lines around their faith and make claims for superiority.
“He can see into the future, he’s got a prophetic streak,” Shulman said of his Pharaoh. “He sees the world going from an inclusive and empowering place, which is the way he views his tradition: any god is welcome and I can become God — so it’s the most empowering — to exclusive and disempowering, because we’re all slaves of God.”
Strangely, this Pharaoh, while holding a nation of Hebrews captive, is a champion of freedom for, in his words, subjugating his slaves’ actions, but not their identity.
In the performance, John will dress in the traditional, 40 pound costume of Ravana. His makeup will take three hours to put on. Kathakali has a base vocabulary of 24 gestures and nine facial expressions, but John is embellishing as he plays everything from a kingly advisor to a child.
“In this story, I counted it, more or less 54 times I am changing,” John said, adding it was the first time he’d done something quite this challenging.
Staging the show in the aftermath of Oct. 7, and the ongoing war in Gaza, Shulman, who was born in Israel and served in the IDF in the late 1990s, believes there is a new urgency to see the humanity of people we may dismiss as our enemies.
Posnick, who also directed the last production of Pharaoh, sees the play as an invitation to change what may be a fixed point of view.
“We all grew up with ideas about Pharaoh: Bad guy, one dimensional, evil person. The play offers us to look at Pharaoh and to look at ourselves differently,” said Posnick. ”Right now we’re living in a place where it’s dangerous to not self-examine.”
Misha Shulman’s Pharaoh debuts March 15 at Theater for the New City. Tickets and more information can be found here
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