An offbeat menagerie of movement and color

COURTESY CHILDREN'S THEATER Children's Theater brings Kipling's fanciful characters to life.

Rudyard Kipling's turn of the century story "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" is a traditional tale about a domesticated mongoose in India who fights a battle against a menacing
cobra. It is a typical narrative, in the vein of the ubiquitous tortoise and the hare story, about a wily underdog who manages to beat
out his adversary. The Yale Child-ren's Theater production takes this age-old narrative and turns it into a play that is exciting, bizarre, and anything but traditional.

The performance opens with a drum beat, played on the tabla by Shafaq Islam,
JE '02, fills the room. When the lights go up, the sparse but colorful stage comes into view. The only set pieces are a table covered in a bright yellow cloth and a mattress. At the back of the stage is a large sheet painted with flowers and butterflies, hung up to hide the backstage area from the rest of the room. The effect produced is a jarring and unusual combination of minimalism and cheeriness.

The task of playing the role of an animal must be a difficult one for any actor; it can often be over-acted, verging absurdity, or under-acted, overlooking the central fact of the character. But the actors and actresses in this performance manage to hit a solid and convincing middle ground. The two most impressive performances come from Shibani Mukerji, MC '01, who plays Rikki, and Karel Sloane, who plays Nag the cobra. Both effectively and surprisingly manage to take on the vocal intonations and movements of the animals they portray. Mukerji moves around the stage, treading on her bare feet, in exactly the sort of eager and impatient way one would imagine a mongoose would move. Sloane's most effective tool is her voice; she delivers her lines in a tone that is low and mysteriously serpentine. But she, too, manages to conform her movements perfectly to fit her character.

The play's most exciting moment is the drawn out battle between Rikki and Nag. Interestingly, the director, Anjali Sachdeva, SY '00, chose to present the fight scenes as highly-choreographed dances. In the battle between Rikki and Nag, Mukerjee and Sloane compete with one another by performing separate dances. As the fight escalates, they move closer together, until they are finally dancing as a pair. The lights are dimmed over this scene; the audience only hears the resounding stomps of the actresses' feet against the floor. The performance manages, in a very successful way, to side-step the depiction of violence, while still creating an intensely severe effect.

While the performance sometimes verges on haunting, several moments that remind the audience that this is children's theater. Sitting in the audience, you occasionally turn around to realize that Mukerji is crouched behind you, chipping at your ear like an animal. One of the most playful scenes comes in the middle of the show when Rashad Bartholomew, SY '01, who plays the tailor-bird Darzee, leads the audience in a call-and-response chant. He shouts out the lines of a song he has made up about Rikki's triumphs and, as the audience shouts them back, it turns into freeform round.

Bartholomew's performance adds an element of humor to the play; his character, which frequently breaks into song, serves as comic relief when the play begins to take a more serious turn.

The costumes, designed by Liz Evans, BR '01, and Sachdeva, provide another reminder that the play is directed toward children. Most of the characters wear black shirts and pants, but their accessories are reminiscent of homemade Halloween costumes; headbands with fur ears on top, tails pinned to the back of clothing, masks, feather-like streamers and hats serve to stand in for the physical characteristics of animals. It is a makeshift wardrobe, but it gets the point across, which is all it seems to strive for.

The performance ultimately achieves what it is setting out to do. It would be difficult to infuse a large degree of pathos into a character that is, at base, just an animal; this play seems to be aware of that reality and moves on from there. It features characters who may not exhibit any secondary dimensions of personality, but are commanding and fun to watch. The sets and costumes are not designed to impress, just to provide a loose aesthetic structure for the narrative. The performance tells us a story, leaving out the excess materials and information that might get in the way of our enjoying it.

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