The Six Paths
Written and directed by My Le
Presented by Theater for the New City, Executive Director Crystal Field, at Theater for the New City
155 First Avenue, Manhattan, NYC
February 19-23, 2025
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| Harsh Desai, Amy Hart Nguyễn, and Siwapol Andy McMurray. |
How much of human action is attributable to humans' own agency, and thus their ethical responsibility, and how individual choices shape and are shaped by the interconnected web of existence of which humanity forms one part are central questions in
The Six Paths, from writer and director My Le, the youngest director in Vietnam to debut at The Hanoi Opera House. Intersecting with such questions in the play are the ways in which the idea of a self, however agentic, is varyingly constructed across cultures and cosmologies. In
The Six Paths, Vietnamese Buddhism provides the ontological framework for an epic yet intimate exploration of identity formation, love and care, grief and sacrifice, and ever-progressing yet perhaps not strictly linear time. Concluding its run at Theater for the New City this weekend,
The Six Paths will return from May 19th to 24th at The Hudson Guild Theater as part of the New York Theater Festival, and updates on these and other future performances can be found by following the production's
Instagram account.
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| Harsh Desai and Belle Le. |
The Six Paths, a title which refers to the possible realms of reincarnation, is indebted to a Vietnamese-Chinese folk story. The play takes its inspiration from the short story "Coi Luan Hoi," by Than Long and translated by Trang Ha, and, in addition to its narrative features, that inspiration makes itself felt in the mythic atmosphere and scope of the journey on which it takes the audience, one that criss-crosses the worlds of the dead and the living and spans multiple lifetimes. The first character we meet, her white clothing luminescent in the spotlight, is in fact dead; unfortunately, this woman, Rebecca Wilder (Mia Rouba M.Kiss), is described by the demons who emerge around her as positively oozing with darkness. To bring such souls to the underworld and cleanse them through suffering falls under the purview of the Black and White Demons (Siwapol Andy McMurray and Amy Hart Nguyễn, respectively), and they are assisted by a young demon (Harsh Desai) whose job is to guide them. He is a lower form of demon and (thus) always hungry (luckily, demons feed on suffering rather than more physical fare). This young demon (young being of course relative on the extra-human time scales of the spirit worlds) is what we might call in other contexts a model employee, inhabiting his position well and obediently. However, when he meets one particular female soul (
Belle Le), a virtuous contrast to Rebecca, who precipitates in him the sort of inner life of which–as Địa Tang (Đavid Lee Huỳnh), the bodhisattva who oversees him, observes–such a demon is not supposed to be capable, he begins a process of self-determination and self-discovery too big for one human lifetime to contain.
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| Mia Rouba M.Kiss, TuQuyen Pham, and Harsh Desai. |
Will human life be what our protagonist expects it to be, even with the best of loving intentions? Contemplating the vicissitudes of existence (including of social class), as he must, both transpires here with vivid particularity and transcends any particular cosmology (one late section tempts a remark about resonances with
Frankenstein); and Desai's performance impressively manifests the young demon's transformation over the course of the play, his decency and virtue, his flaws and his anguish, even his literal childhood innocence. McMurray and Hart Nguyễn are both entertaining and creepy as the Black and White Demons, qualities enhanced by some effective makeup, as well as by choreography by Jeevika Bhat. McMurray also has a touching turn as an elderly farmer whose daughter, Ly Ly (a funny and moving TuQuyen Pham), may have much more than first appears in common with the woman who catalyzed the young demon's inner stirrings of thought and emotion. Le embodies her character as a playful child and a tragic young woman with equal artistry, and M.Kiss's expressive puppeteering brings personality to Ly Ly and her father's ox. Elsewhere, shadow puppets figure in one of a few standout wordless sequences set to music–the others, rather contrastingly, involving hellish torture in one instance and farming in the other.
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| Amy Hart Nguyễn and Harsh Desai. |
At various points in the play, judiciously placed monologues compress time while contributing to the folkloric feel, but it is the importance and value of the mundane rather than the mythic that perhaps ultimately comes to the fore: savoring a moment of sun or wind on the skin or of proximity to a loved one. The awareness of that importance, at least, certainly comes down to individual agency. So too does the decision to see
The Six Paths if you have a chance, and among the many decisions in a human life, that should be one of the easier ones.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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