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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">Courtesy of Mei Theater: A family affair: Fachrizal Mochsen, Joice Ellvira and Fritz Marx Takarbessy inject humor into Pinangan.The newly established Mei Theater Company has its own idealism behind its temporary rejection of lengthy monologues and politically charged storylines.

Aiming to attract audiences by staging comedies like Pinangan (The Proposal), which is an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s one-act play A Marriage Proposal, might be see as an obvious marketing strategy, but that move in itself embodies the company’s bold dream to tap into a wider market beyond the usual theater enthusiasts.

Firsty Soebratawidjaja, one of the directors of Pinangan, said that she and her 25 colleagues in Mei Theater Company are conscious of the market demands that determine a theater company’s viability to exist as a source of living for its members.

“Our idealism is that theater should still exist above the surface … We still have [artistic] idealism but we also want theater to be our occupation, to make money out of it; because it is the path that we have chosen,” she said last weekend after the staging of Pinangan in Jakarta.

Mei Theater Company, whose members are mainly students or former students of the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ), emphasized the play’s romantic comedy aspect and toned down its sociopolitical accents.

“Perhaps other theaters have already talked about social politics. I think people are in grave need of entertainment, and what’s more, what is important now is how to get the public interested in watching theater in general. That’s all,” Firsty said.

She added that the company remained true to A Marriage Proposal’s main storyline, which basically tells of a bizarre situation in which a man’s attempt to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage keeps devolving into arguments centering on wealth and pride.

However, the Mei Company added a homegrown touch to Pinangan by adapting the play not merely to a local setting and language, but more specifically into an eastern Indonesian cultural context.

“We often run into [representations of] the culture of western and central Indonesia, rendering eastern Indonesian culture as untouched or unpopular. Most of us merely know that eastern [Indonesian] culture leans more toward music, therefore Mei Theater Company tries … to present the arts and culture from eastern Indonesia into Pinangan,” the company’s publication said.

Thus, the character of Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov, the hypochondriac, love struck landowner, is transformed into Ambonese Glenn Takarbessy, played by Fachrizal Mochsen.

Natalya Stepanovna, the 25-year-old maiden designated as the target for his proposal, becomes Manadonese Monica Tamberongan, and her father, originally Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov, becomes John Tamberongan, played by Fritz Max Takarbessy.

Manadonese people are known to hail from North Sulawesi, while Ambonese people are seen as the native inhabitants of Maluku.

The story, according to Firsty, takes place in the 1970s in Cipanas, West Java, where both families, Takarbessy and Tamberongan, live as well-off landowners.

The play opens with a group of Ambonese youths singing and playing the guitar while swigging what appears to be an alcoholic drink. Along comes Glenn, immaculately dressed, and with flower in hand, on his way to ask John for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

After plenty of guffaws and more singing, Glenn goes on his way and the youths’ carousing become louder until they are chased away by John, who is disturbed by the noise.

In John’s garden, Glenn begins to convey his purpose of coming to the Tamberongan house, nervously by going around in circles in his speech, despite his constant assurances that he is “getting straight to the point”.

However, in his blabbering, he makes a mistake by mentioning Lapangan Sari Gading, a piece of land that has for a long time been a source of dispute between the Tamberongan and Takarbessy clans.

Thus begin the twists in Pina-ngan. Alternating with songs and jokes, which sometimes border on the slapstick, the audience broke into laughter every now and then, and the atmosphere in the Theater Studio, Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM), was markedly jovial.

One member of the audience, Meta said, however, that she was slightly dissatisfied with the play’s climax. “I was hoping for something more intense”, she smiled.

Several apparently spontaneous jokes, in which the actors reeled off gags that fell outside the play’s context in terms of situation, and even language accent, made their way into Pinangan that night, especially in the middle of Fachrizal’s lines. The actor also at times appeared to succumb to the spontaneity of the other actors around him.

The formula was still a rewarding one for the audience but at times gave the play a sloppy touch. However, Firsty said that all the jokes had in fact been rehearsed, with even the latest one having appeared previously during rehearsals the day before.

The most lovable character of the night was perhaps Domingus, a young Ambonese adolescent, one of the carousing youths who looks up to Glenn as his “older brother”. A drinker, smoker and repeated failure in passing his school grades, the character, played by Almanzo Konoralma, became the unlikely hero at one point.

Domingus, however, was not an original character from The Marriage Proposal. In fact, the whole group of Ambonese youths was invented for Pinangan. That goes also for the play’s score, which included traditional and pop songs.

“From what I know, the Ambonese and Manadonese people really like to sing,” Firsty said. She added, however, that Pinangan was not to be categorized as a musical.

According to her, the message behind the play is about customs and traditions. “There are customs for everything, even in love. If you like a woman, tell her you want her to be your girlfriend. If you want to marry her, come to her house to propose to her parents,” she said.

Mei Theater is planning to show Pinangan by taking it on the road to a number of regions, including Bali and Surakarta, Central Java, next year.

In fact, the road show plan was partly the reason why the company chose to produce Pinangan, which requires a relatively small number of actors and a simple stage set.

“We don’t want it to be complicated. It’s just a comedy with a few characters, and yet it’s entertaining … we can even perform it outside a building or in a park, for example,” Firsty said.

Pinangan was performed last Saturday and Sunday. However, its very first performance, which used a complete set in the form of a house, was first staged in 2007 as part of a final assignment for a number of IKJ students, including Firsty.

“We have improved much [from that first version] in terms of [the player’s mastering of] dialects for example,” she said.

Firsty said that although Mei Theater Company would likely concentrate on comedies for the next two to five years, it would also consider producing “serious” plays in the future.

The company carried out a number of promotional activities to attract an audience for Pinangan, ranging from the conservative method of putting up posters, to posting the play’s trailers on YouTube.

“Several [Mei Theater members] also teach in schools or are involved in school plays. So they tried to sell tickets [in those schools],” Firsty added, who codirected Pinangan along with Achoy Banged.

More than half the seats in the Theater Studio room, which has a capacity for 200, were filled during the first night of Pinangan. According to Firsty, audience members included people outside theater members’ friends and relatives.

“Most of the time, our audiences are made up of friends and family of IKJ people. We want to avoid that. We want to get people … who are just starting to enjoy watching theater,” she said.

“We were surprised that quite a number of people showed up, especially for a new theater company like ours.”