Dr. R. Purnima Brings Neuropsychiatric Diseases to Stage for the 300th Time

Stage Chemistry: Neuropsychiatric Disorders on Stage performed by Dr. R. Purnima of Children's Literary Club and KSOU at Department of English, University of Mysore - Amulya Hiremath

There is a fervour — a pretty rare kind, the kind that envelopes the space when one is returning to a place of familiarity that they once frequented but don’t as much anymore. Dr. R. Purnima is returning, to the English department at the University of Mysore that she passed out of decades ago, which gave her her Master’s and Ph.D. — this time to stage her play ‘Stage Chemistry: Neuro-Psychiatric Disorders on Stage’ for the 300th time.

“This is a very special performance for me because I am staging it in the department I graduated from; I wanted my 300th performance to be here, so I refused to take up shows before this,” she says. A practitioner and ardent endorser of the theatre of education and social change, Dr. Purnima, a retired professor of English at the Karnataka State Open University (KSOU), founded the Children’s Literary Club in 1990 in Mysuru. Established to educate children beyond their curriculum and make learning accessible through the involvement of creative modes of teaching, especially theatre and fine arts, the club is actively involved in facilitating its interests through various workshops and programs, conducted across the state and country.

Dr. Purnima arrives hoisting four bags all by herself, calm and comfortable. There’s tea and introductions, all quickly savoured in anticipation of the performance. “The idea started as an itch that wouldn’t go away until I had formed it into a play,” she confides with the audience, taking them behind the story of how such an unusual topic became her subject. First staged in 2018, the focus is on the many neuropsychiatric diseases and how they affect human life. In its full scale, the play is episodic with each part highlighting a specific disorder, and spans the lives of real and fictional characters, latter a nod to Dr. Purnima’s background in literature. Narration, description, and dramatization are interwoven throughout, allowing Dr. Purnima to further shed light on the disorders, their causes, and their cure. An extension of her mode of theatre for education, Stage Chemistry goes beyond just a one-dimensional portrayal of diseases that seem so removed from our realities but have a very real chance of affecting our lives. The point invariably surfaces in some time, given how we were in the Department of English — there is something Brechtian about it all.

As she enters the Senior Hall, the place of performance, there is a yellow piece of cardboard paper that Dr. Purnima has fished out and is trying to pin to the wall. It’s going to act as the yellow wallpaper for her first episode; later when she uses a piece of chalk for a taper, she confirms that in educational theatre, whatever resembles will do, it’s not about high-budget productions but driving home the lesson. She sets the stage herself — there’s that fervour again — she knows the chairs, the desks, she’s sat in them and now they sit for her.

With the scene set and a quick change of clothes, the play is underway. The first episode is an enactment of The Yellow Wallpaper, one of the founding texts of American feminism by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Dr. Purnima calls Gilman a medical iconoclast for her portrayal of the protagonist in the story — who, confined to a nursery by her physician husband and asked to forcefully rest as a cure for her depression, is driven to hysteria, stimulated by a patterned yellow wallpaper in the room. In an exploration of home and freedom, how they inevitably feed off of and depend on each other, Dr. Purnima further highlights how, in medicine, one size does not fit all.

In the next episode, Dr. Purnima snaps back to real life as she unravels a story very close to her heart, one that she has interacted with first-hand. Based on Teju, who passed away 22 years ago, the scene looks at the life-threatening disorder of Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a neuro-muscular disorder that affects young children. Playing the part of Teju’s parents and his teacher, Dr. Purnima spotlights the disease through the responses of primary caregivers. In the end, she only hopes for a cure to this disease.

With a simple change of a sweater and a shawl, the moving of a chair from the left of stage to right, the episode switches. Each is preceded by an introduction by Dr. Purnima and ends with a discussion on the advancements in the medical field. We look at Motor Neuro Disease (MND) by way of Devirayya, whose symptoms start off with a persistent cough, and his wife Indrani who is a school teacher. Though the scenes are structurally simple, they are detailed, down to the little things, bringing the story and the disorders all the more closer to reality.

Next, Dr. Purnima tackles the disease of Alzheimer’s in its all too familiar charade, theatrically narrating the story of two sisters. Stretched out over a more dialogic episode, Alzheimer’s devastation is one that is hard to contain, affecting all those around almost as deeply as the victim. Drawing participation from the audience, Dr. Purnima, who has not shied away from eye contact and direct conversation with her viewers, blurs the gap between the two sides of the stage even further. This, by extension, can also be seen as a parallel to how these diseases take even the caregivers into its fold.

Dr. Purnima picks up her literary reigns for the final episode as she showcases the much-enacted scene of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Arguably his most famous scene, Dr. Purnima’s aim is to bring to the forefront the disorders inherent in it — sleepwalking and hallucination, both auditory and visual. The hands are washed, the classic lines are uttered but the blood, the disorder remains.

It is fascinating how theatre serves to deliver complicated medical disorders in a comprehensible form for all in the span of an hour and a half. The very first performance went up to three hours, Dr. Purnima informs; she has more episodes to narrate, including the stories of Mary Lamb and Sylvia Plath which are also a part of her repository. Dr. Purnima insists on wrapping and packing up by herself — she has an order, she says. The fervour from before resurfaces and finds space for itself in her bag, its soft-ended trails spilling out, lingering — anticipating return again but dissipating into the walls until then.

Throughout the performance, the screams and wails of pain are frequent and blood-curdling, only a reminder that illnesses do not single out on a person and that its suffering is manifold, especially to the people who take on the role of caregivers, be it out of love, family bonds or professionally. Dr. Purnima does not want to scare anyone, her sole aim is awareness. She harbours hope for a cure to all diseases, especially Spinal Muscular Atrophy for which none is yet known. At the end of the 300th show — 263rd one-woman show — neuropsychiatric disorders are brought one step closer, made more humane, medical research and complex jargon are made next door; the theatre has successfully educated and informed.