Partition Review after 5-times a Viewer

Indra's Net Theater presents Partition, by Ira Hauptman (Jan. 2017)

Indra's Net's annual production, in 2017, was 'Partition,' and the show's final week was, partly due to the theater company's strong following of local Berkeley and Bay Area natives and partly due to the show's momentum, sold out or over sold.  It is what theater should be:  mindful entertainment. 

Please do consider the speaking marks of colonialism and its historical repercussions in the inter-human interactions of every two people, and please do consider the game of dichotomies that is West vs. East, religion vs. atheism, proof vs. belief, shoes vs. sandals, light vs. dark. But please also be ready and eager to see a rigor in Ramanujan and a poetry in Hardy, a strictness in romance and a broadness in truth coming from two very different voices, but voices that are speaking a language shared more by each other than maybe anyone else in their world.

It is a bit shocking that I haven’t yet heard or read any commentary about the play’s many strategies for asking the “big questions” of meaning, bigger than but entirely wrapped up in culture and politics, sexuality and custom. “How can I escape the verdict of a ruined life?” What could cause someone to “throw away [his] life for a note scribbled in a margin?” But it also isn’t shocking, since it’s taken me a month between my first viewing of the production and this viewing during the closing weekend to be moved and realize some of why I am moved: big questions are annoying, because they nag at you even from underneath the layers of trivial dismissals you throw on top of them. You cover them because they are terrifying. They are terrifying because they are beautifully vital to your own life.

Anyways! 
What I see now, after looking or searching on and off for almost a month, is the annoyingly ever-present desire for connection. Big surprise. 
One man, an overwhelmingly fluid and romantic heart, sets his value in the devoted communion of his travel-partner goddess, but even that law of worship is turned away in favor of another law—a law of human-to-human communion (respect and decency). 
Another man, an overwhelmingly, rigorously British-professor soul, sets his value in his contributions to the simple beauty (sometimes even funny) of a cold poetry he calls mathematics, but even that value is led by a deeper desire to connect and remain connected to a world.

Seemingly, in every respect, these two men should not spend more than a second alone together in a room. But then again, they share a language, they share loved work, they share a reason for devoting their lives to “a scribbled note in a margin:” knowledge. 
We could call it truth or beauty. But I like “knowledge” because what I see is two men desiring to be known.

It’s still astonishing to me to see how we push farthest away the exact thing we desire the most. Hardy ostracizes himself from Ramanujan, from all of his peers except one Classics professor (a fascinating choice for a “cold-blooded,” “Britisher” mathematician...), and from himself via his strict aversion to mirrors. Ramanujan remains isolated as a stranger in a strange land, and rejects small steps to join other professors at High Table, for example, even at the end rejecting his goddess-companion and guide, Namagiri, thereby (arguably) rejecting himself and beginning his final goodbyes.

Ramanujan’s open-veined cry for connection is immediately felt. Hardy’s comes gradually. When Ramanujan declares that, since he clearly doesn’t belong in England and will be excluded from much of his caste when he returns to India, his only home now is the one Hardy has given him—built of mathematics and the infinite act of creation that is numbers—Hardy is completely and understandably overwhelmed. In this goodbye scene it is clear that these two men are in many respects all each other has, or the most each one has. And yet, they say goodbye.

Ultimately, a new standard could have been elected. When Hobbes-class is no longer the best, why not move on to Bradman? Well, because it’s a lot harder, a lot more annoying, to move from a standard of glory, distance and inequalities to a standard of peers, recognition, and “something approaching equal terms.”

These big questions are everywhere in the play, verbatim (unless I’m misquoting). Were they understated or overstated? I don’t know. 

Maybe such obvious historical-political framework makes it easier to not see the big questions (how interesting...how ironic?), and maybe without this framework of likewise social and cultural concerns we wouldn’t be able to breathe for all the BIG QUESTIONS being preached at us. 

It took a few viewings, but I did find the intricacies of each character within the many apparent topic shifts of each conversation. Namagiri and Billington have many of these with Ramanujan and Hardy respectively. They are the shifts from someone who knows more what the current conversation is really about. And the audience is invited to catch up along with Ramanujan and Hardy only after the fact. Ramanujan and Hardy, however, I think now, can only be intricate if I allow the theatrical staging and representationalism to move me toward the life-large questions they are both asking (“How can I escape the verdict of a ruined life?” And the heartbreakingly-delivered “Was my work any good?”).

For example, the space presented three symbolic worlds: the podium-shrine, elevated for both centers of Ramanujan’s world (the English mathematician and the Hindu Goddess), the middle world primarily reserved for Ramanujan’s private conversations, and the third platform that ends the line and touches most of the audience: Cambridge.