DLAR: You’re now going into your third decade of Indian Ink. It feels safe to say — it’s working out! Is there any advice that you would give to someone about creating such a long-standing, reliable creative partnership?

Jacob Rajan: I think we’re very fortunate in that we have very compatible skill sets. I do things that Justin can’t do, and he certainly does things I can’t do. I don’t think we’ve ever really argued, but if there’s an argument, it’s about the work. That’s the core fundamental of creative partnership — we can disagree about the work, and that’s it. It’s not about our egos, about “who wrote what, when.” It’s just, is it any good? That leads to a level of trust and honesty. When you’re just talking about the work, you can sort of pack your little self away and look at the big thing that you’re working on together.

Justin Lewis: I’d add that there’s something about our values that are quite compatible, as human beings. Our upbringings, our values. As an organization, we quite consciously think and talk about our values. I think that it is your values that pull you through what you’re doing.

DLAR: In terms of blending compatible values, Indian Ink works blend elements of Eastern and Western theatre traditions. What is it like trying to kind of meld those things, and create kind of a conversation between the different styles of theatre?

JR: I try not to lean too hard into the whole identity thing. It’s sort of baked into who I am. Basically, we’re a couple of guys getting on, who are still trying to figure out how to live a good life and navigate all the cultural complexities of that. The actual core of it is just being human. How do you be a good human? Of course, that makes the work universal. We love the specificity of delving into stuff from my Indian background, and we celebrate that difference. At the end of the day, that is really what the plays often throw light on — fundamentally, at our core, we’re human beings who all fear our mortality, who are all looking for love, all of those core things that are understood across cultures. That’s why we’re able to work as an international company.

JL: And, you know, when we do things that don’t have some Indian component or cross-cultural component, our audiences are a bit puzzled. They go, “What’s Indian Ink? Where’s the Indian bit of that?” The audiences are looking for us to speak to that experience and show them something of that world on stage. We’ve been going for almost thirty years. Jacob was the first Indian graduate from the New Zealand Drama School. Since then, there’s been a whole lot more graduates and a new wave of young people coming through. There is a call for us to represent, to some extent, on stage, which is a little tricky. Very tricky for me, as a white man in that space. For me, that’s about listening and always questioning.

DLAR: On the note of representation, and going back, Jacob, to what you said about mortality… Something shifted a few years ago, and I presume you were already work shopping Paradise when the pandemic began. In many Indian Ink plays, there’s a lack of shyness about death and mortality. So, you’re working on something that looks straight on at death, and mirrored outside you in the world, there’s this cataclysmic representation of mortality. What was it like to experience that? Did it change how you were thinking about the work?

JL: Humans are weird, right? When we’re faced with death, we buy toilet paper. We’re trying to puzzle out how to live a good life. If you’re driven by your fears into strange behaviors that you’re not conscious of, it makes it hard to live a good life, I guess. I do Aikido and martial art, and one of the things about the Buddha is every day you have to be prepared to face your death. You can live a better life if you’re prepared to look at that stuff straight on. There’s a Buddhist tradition where you meditate on your death every day, and it frees you from that stuff.

JR: When we started writing the play, it did have a different feel to it. Then the pandemic hit, and having a career in “mass gathering” seemed like a really tenuous existence, and we pulled back. Often our plays have a bigger element of audience interaction — Paradise, we deliberately pulled back from that. So we had a man alone, isolated. It’s a very open kind of playing style, but not that direct engagement that we’ve kind of played with in the past. That was really informed by that whole experience of the pandemic. It’s absurd, the little buffers that we have against this really unpalatable truth that we are all going to die. That’s in the DNA of Indian Ink. Human beings are such terrified little creatures and do the most extraordinary things to avoid that. And wonderful things.The underpinning of our philosophy is called the “serious laugh.” Opening the audience’s mouths with laughter in order to slip something serious in. That’s the trick. I certainly don’t want to go to the theater and be banged over the head with tragedy and how terrible life is. But nutritionally, for my soul to be nourished, I need something serious. That’s what we’re trying to do.

DLAR: You mentioned an appreciation for things that are larger than life. Masks are really crucial to a lot of Indian Ink, perhaps indicating toward a tradition in Greek theater, or Noh drama, or Commedia, etc. The use of masks is so historical that it’s almost strange to see in contemporary theater. From your perspective, how do the masks work to enrich what you’re doing on stage?

JL: Well, I think it’s essential to everything we do, and it has many forms. The mask is about creating some sort of gap between the performer and their character’s physical manifestation. So, how can the performer change the way they hold their body, the rhythms they use in their body, their breath, and the way they see the world? That gap allows the performer’s imagination to enter into that space and the audience’s imagination to enter into that space. We work most with the Commedia and Balinese mask traditions. The amplification of emotion and the amplification of silliness and the amplification of tragedy is what’s so wonderful about the mask. It requires the performer to enter into things with a bigger scale of emotion, of attitude. All of these things are necessary to kind of have life on stage. The mask is like the [film] camera, the nose is like the camera on a mask — it tells you where to look, where the focus is.

JR: When I first put a mask on in a workshop, and I saw this with everybody, you do disappear. You’re given permission to be something quite other. I always think when I look at somebody — and this is getting a bit cosmic and spooky about it — you are possessed, you know, you’re possessed by the mask. And a mask teacher would say, “Good mask work is 100% trance, but 100% technique,” because you have to know where your eyes are lit, and how to present so the audience sees. You’re not in profile. You’re 45°, or straight on. All of these things are craft, but ultimately, you also are possessed by the mask, and you will look at the world differently through the eyes [of the mask]. You will perceive the world differently. That transformation is really an imaginative pact between the actor and the audience which lives in theater. That only happens in that live engagement, in the shared air. That sort of crackling, alternating current is what I want to see. That’s the thing that I really enjoy when I go to the theatre.

DLAR: Is there anything that ever surprises you that you do when you are in the mask trance? Like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe I just did that. I can’t believe that just happened.”

JR: I mean, absolutely. And that’s the moment that you “pop out,” because as soon as you’ve done that, you’re no longer in it. But, yes, that’s actually what I live for as an actor. Those moments of flow, especially with solo work, where I’m acting and reacting and time loses its kind of form, and you’re just going through the actions of the play, telling the story, and also holding the audience. That’s a pretty powerful kind of drug, and I’m really hooked.

DLAR: Just to wrap things up, is there anything that you can give readers a sneak peek into as far as what you were working on next?

JL: We can! We’re working on a new play that will first come to life in New Zealand at the end of next year. It’s an adaptation of a short story by Rabindranath Tagore, who’s a Nobel Prize-winning Indian author, one of his most famous short stories called “The Kabuliwallah,” or “The Man from Kabul.” It’s an adaptation of that story into a contemporary context, and looks at the experience of migrant workers being exploited. We’ve also started working with Actors Theatre of Louisville on a new project, an immersive piece, picking up and building on the spirit of Mrs. Krishnan’s Party.