Where’s a Hindu god when you need one?
The teenage schoolgirls of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s “The Chronicles of Kalki” need not wonder. Into their turbulent adolescent lives comes an avatar of Vishnu (well, maybe) to show them the way to self-empowerment — whatever it takes.
Moxie Theatre’s production of Kapil’s play opening today is directed by Desireé Clarke, the newly named executive artistic director of the company. Though most of their pre-production contact has been through email, the Los Angeles-based Kapil deems Clarke “a perfect fit” to direct “Kalki,” one of three plays that are part of her “Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy” first performed 10 years ago at Minneapolis’ Mixed Blood Theatre.
Another work from that trilogy, the standup-comedy “Brahman/i,” was workshopped in 2013 as part of La Jolla Playhouse’s DNA New Work Series. Kapil also wrote a short play for the Playhouse’s WOW Festival “Car Plays” event that year. She’s excited to have “The Chronicles of Kalki” finally produced at Moxie after discussions about doing so several years ago were interrupted by COVID-19.
A “comic-book-infused girl-gang thriller” as Kapil calls it, “The Chronicles of Kalki” has definite autobiographical roots. The half-Indian playwright said she was bullied while living in Sweden and attending school there.
“I was very much the brown kid with parents who have accents,” she recalled. “I had a really rough time to the point where my parents yanked me out of my preschool and put me in an international school. What I encountered there was that I may have been brown like the others, but I was poor, which was unlike the others.”
While traveling to and from home to that international school, Kapil first encountered comic books.
At one stop along the way, she said, “There was a 20-minute wait for the bus at this one station and not much to do.” At a store nearby, Kapil discovered a rack of comic books with titles that included the freshly arrived “X-Men” series.
“It was addictive,” she said of using those 20 minutes time after time to read those comics. “I could not wait to be stuck there the next day and the next day. That was my escape, because the magical thing about those comics was that they were all outcasts. But what made them outcasts was their superpowers. They were just misunderstood.”
Kapil says that the two teen girls and the mysterious Kalki all “represent different facets of how I felt about things back then.”
Among the issues her characters in the play are dealing with is sexual curiosity, something Kapil said is usually not affirmed for young women.
“There’s that ‘unattractive’ hunger that you might have,” she said. “Then there’s the possibility that you just don’t know how to or don’t want to navigate this at all. It’s never going to be pretty or easy.”
For Kapil, her work being onstage is a way to perhaps make it easier.
“I love that it’s out there in dialogue with people,” she said. “It’s hard to share your innermost thoughts, but the play is doing that for me.”
‘The Chronicles of Kalki’
When: Opens today. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through June 4
Where: Moxie Theatre, 6663 El Cajon Blvd., Ste. N, Rolando
Tickets: $25-$50
Phone: (858) 598-7620
Online: moxietheatre.com
Coddon is a freelance writer.