Che’Li in the foreground with Alyssa Taiber, Eliana Durnbaugh, and Taylor West in Ankita Raturi’s “Fifty Boxes of Earth” at Theater Mu. (Photo by Rich Ryan)
In one chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire hunter Van Helsing explains the best ways to defeat the monster in their midst. One key data point: Dracula brought 50 boxes of earth from his home, without which he will die. One obvious method to kill him: Sterilize the earth.
That was playwright Ankita Raturi’s inspiration for Fifty Boxes of Earth, a response to Stoker’s novel viewed through the frames of queerness and xenophobia. The play, in its world premiere at Theater Mu in St. Paul, Minnesota (Feb. 27-March 16), follows Q, who moves into a new neighborhood with 50 boxes of earth for the community garden. When fantastical, improbable plants begin to grow, so too does one man’s distrust of Q, even as his daughter tries to befriend their new neighbor.
“It’s the idea that you’ve got to bring something with you to survive in a new place,” Raturi said, “and that the people that are already there are going to continually try to take that away from you, or make it impossible for something to grow and really treat you as monstrous.”
Director kt shorb’s production, featuring choreography from Ananya Chatterjea, will set out to create the mysterious garden with puppetry. Raturi pointed out that in South Asian performance practices, these are “not separate entities. I talk about this play a lot like a braid. The elements I am trying to braid are this dialogue drama element between the characters, this dance element representing the nature of the garden and the atmosphere, and then puppetry as what is growing, thriving, or dying in this atmosphere.”
Fifty Boxes is not an adaptation of Dracula, Raturi noted, but an exploration inspired by a “queering the canon” master class she took in grad school. Director shorb added that the play looks to balance an ecological ethos with human conflict. “You can still just watch it,” they affirmed, “as a story about a father and a child and this new person in a community garden.”
Jerald Raymond Pierce is the managing editor of American Theatre.
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