OH! | Indonesia
Written by Putu Wijaya
Translated by Cobina Gillitt
Directed by Warner Crocker
In partnership with
Synopsis: OH! explores difference, justice, and truth-both in the courtroom and in the conscience of the community. It depicts the paradox between a parent's longing for his child and the ambition of a brilliant but arrogant young man who places his career first. The play manifests the inner voice of a renowned Senior Attorney who can no longer speak or walk due to a stroke. He longs to see his only son, now a famous lawyer trained under his guidance.
The Young Attorney arrives to fulfill his father's request, but he comes not as a son, but as an ambitious lawyer seeking his mentor's opinion on a case: defending a drug dealer facing two death sentences. What becomes clear is that it is the Young Attorney's ghost who arrives-apologizing and confessing that he now understands he was wrong. When he last visited his father, he should have come not as an arrogant lawyer, but as a son. But all of that has already happened. Nothing can be done to fix it.
Playwright - Putu Wijaya
Translator - Cobina Gillitt
Director - Warner Crocker
Playwright - Putu Wijaya is one of Indonesia’s most acclaimed and prolific playwrights and monologists. He is also a director of stage, screen, and television, an actor, a novelist, a short story writer, and cultural critic known for his innovations of post-1968 Indonesian theatre and literature. His plays mix western and traditional Indonesian performance aesthetics and spirituality. In l972, he formed Teater Mandiri, and continues as the group’s artistic director and playwright. Mandiri is Javanese for “independent”—a guiding concept for the group whose motto is “to build from what is at hand.” By irreverently mixing fantasy and reality, Putu invokes “mental terror” in the hearts of his audiences. He attacks the monotonous rhythms of daily life and apathy toward the status quo. In order to create this sense of terror, Putu has often used dozens of actors, deafening music and sound effects, jarring images, colorful costumes, sets, and props, loud delivery, burning incense, and illogical situations. Teater Mandiri has performed Putu Wijaya’s plays under his direction in across Indonesia, the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brunei, Egypt, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. He regularly performs his monologues in Indonesia and has conducted workshops around the world, including at the 2007 La Mama International Symposium for Directors in Umbria, Italy, held artistic residencies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wesleyan University, Towson University, and Hunter College. In 2003, his play Luka opened the prestigious Laokoon Festival in Hamburg. The following year, he was invited to Belgrade to direct Perang (War) in his signature style at the time using a shadow screen filling the entire proscenium. In 2018, he received an Honorary Doctorate in Theatre from ISI (Indonesian Arts Institute) in Yogyakarta, Central Java. He has published more than forty full-length plays, dozens of short plays, over one hundred monologues, more than thirty novels, fifteen short story anthologies, and has written and directed close to two dozen screenplays and television series. His works have been translated into English include Geez (Gerr, trans. Michael Bodden, 1986), Roar (Aum, trans. Michael Bodden, 1986), Bomb: Indonesian Short Stories (1988), Telegram (trans. Stephen J. Epstein, 2011), as well as Ought (Aduh 2010), Shaytan (Zetan 2017), and OH! (2024) translated by Cobina Gillitt. Despite a stroke that left him in a wheelchair with difficulty seeing and speaking, he continues to write almost every day, posting “Musings” on Facebook several times a week.
Translator - Cobina Gillitt (PhD) is a translator of Indonesian plays and a freelance new play and production dramaturg located in New York City. She has been a member of Putu Wijaya’s theatre company, Teater Mandiri, since 1988 and has performed and toured with the group in Indonesia, the US, and Germany. Her most recent collection of play translations is Era of the Bat: Six Political and Abstract Plays by Ikranagara (Lontar Foundation, 2024) for which she also wrote the introduction. She edited and wrote the introductions for the anthologies The Lontar Anthology of Drama, Vol 3: New Directions 1965-1998 (Lontar Foundation, 2011; University of Hawaii Press, 2017) and Islands of Imagination I: Modern Indonesian Plays (Hawaii University Press, 2015) both of which also include several of her translations. Other published translations can be found in The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review (2024), Asymptote Journal (2017), New Indonesian Plays (Aurora Metro Books, 2019), Three Plays by Three Indonesian Playwrights (Jakarta Arts Council, 2006), and Playwriting Workshop: Three Selected Plays (Jakarta Arts Council, 2006). Her scholarship on contemporary Indonesian theatre includes “A Legacy of Theatricality: Antonin Artaud’s Encounter with Balinese Gamelan” in Performing Indonesia (Smithsonian, Museum of Asian Art, 2016), “How the Fish Swims in Dirty Water: Antigone in Indonesia” in Antigones on the Contemporary World Stage (Oxford University Press, 2011) and “Indonesian Theatre and its Double: Putu Wijaya Paints a Theatre of Mental Terror” in Performance of the Senses (Routledge, 2006).
Director – Warner Crocker is delighted to return to one of his favorite gigs, The International Voices Project. Before returning to Chicago in 2013 he served as the Artistic Director of Wayside Theatre in Virginia for 15 seasons. Before that stint on the East Coast he worked for 20 years in Chicago Theatre as Artistic Director for Absolute Theatre Company, New Tuners Theatre, and Pegasus Players, and also directed for other Chicago theatres. He has produced and directed more plays than he can count, is the author of several, and has won a few awards along the way. Recent regional and Chicago directing gigs include The Lehman Trilogy, Ink, The Play That Goes Wrong; Shear Madness; Peter Pan, the US premiere of Diamonds and Divas; Junk; Pinocchio; Bunny Bunny Gilda Radner, A Sort of Love Story; The Bridges of Madison County; Boing Boing; Barnum; The Seven-Percent Solution, and The Man Who Murdered Sherlock Holmes.