Off-Central, Outcast bear fruit with Kapil’s ‘Orange’

Onstage through Aug. 11 at the Off-Central, Aditi Kapil’s Orange takes the audience on a road trip of self-discovery along with its three characters; everybody, audience included, comes away somehow changed.

Directed by Troy Brooks, Orange is – on the surface, anyway – a lighthearted drama about three joyriding teens. Leela has arrived in California with her mother, from their home in India, to attend a relative’s wedding. Her rebellious cousin Priti “borrows” a car and convinces Leela to get out of the house with her.

They pick up Gar, Priti’s long-suffering, on-again, off-again boyfriend, and drive off into the night.

The California kids know that Leela is on the autism spectrum – it wasn’t terribly difficult to talk her into the “adventure.” Conversations with her tend to be elliptical and difficult. She’s sometimes off in her own world, sketching; she name-drops facts and figures almost as quickly as Dustin Hoffman in that old movie Rain Main.

Yet Leela is endearing, and very, very smart, and manages to keep up with Priti and Gar as they veer from one potentially dangerous situation to another.

Troy Brooks

“One of the big themes I saw in it was communication, and the way that we communicate with each other,” explains Brooks, a well-known local actor who’s making his directorial debut. He says he identifies on the autism spectrum, too.

“That’s a thing for people on the spectrum: We have a tough time communicating in the ways that neurotypical people do. It’s always the sentiment that people on the spectrum don’t know how to communicate, but I would turn around and say it’s more the other way around. Neurotypical people have this weird code, going around the topic that they want to talk about.

“If you look at it, Leela’s maybe the best communicator in this play. With all the people around her walking on eggshells and not wanting to say the things that should be said.”

Kathryn Huettel plays Leela with a combination of wide-eyed innocence and resilience.

Annalise Drab is Priti, and Leela’s mother, and a wobbly drunk woman on the beach … she, in fact, plays all the women in Orange. Faizan Basheer is Gar, and all the men – including Leela’s stern father, who’s almost embarrassed by his daughter.

“This play, I was just amazed at how frank and realistic it took the subject matter,” explains Brooks, who’s directing Orange as a collaboration between the Off-Central and Outcast Theatre Collective.

“The show read to me more like an indie film script – the dialogue was so natural. Just the way people talked felt so real and interesting. I started visualizing it so easily, and I just loved it so much. It was so funny and so touching.”

Michael Horn contributed his significant expertise in all things technical, from lighting and sound to set design, but Troy Brooks did virtually everything else.

“This was kind of a small crew, so not only did I direct, I did all the projections and the illustrations, I shopped for props, I painted all of those muslins and I painted the flats. This show was my baby so much that I even wanted to do costume design.

“I knew exactly that Gar was going to have a Nirvana In Utero T-shirt, and I wanted Priti to have a Young the Giant shirt – it’s a California indie band with an Indian-American lead singer.

“The shirt has mountains on it … and Leela wants to go to the mountains to see the gods. Then I wanted to have a Young the Giant song playing … so I figured I’d do the sound design, too.”

Find Orange tickets here.