(Mis)Adventures of a Romantic

“Things that you are most sad about are always the funniest later. I find my own tragedies very funny,” says Katz. One psychic told her, “I see you’ve got a good heart, but it is lonely. You’ve been giving but not receiving the good love that you want, the good love that you need. There’s one thing standing in your way, you’ve got a curse but the good news is I can get rid of it for you. Tonight. Get rid of your curse, for $1400.” In the shadows of New York’s skyscrapers and surrounded by a ruined economy, Katz chooses to follow the promise of happiness in a way that cynics would find anarchic.

“I had a history of unrequited love. All through my twenties, I would fall in love with someone who, often, I didn’t know that well. They would, maybe, like me as a friend but I wouldn’t notice anybody else because I would be so obsessed with them’ I would think, ‘It’ll work, it’ll work, it’ll work’,” she says. The hour-long plot follows Katz as she falls in love with a man in Melbourne and does all that the psychics and healers tell her — for a price — to make the relationship work. “At one point, they gave me some washing powder to put in his laundry,” says Katz. In her late thirties now, Katz still refuses to let go of romantic dreams, and this gives a universal resonance to her personal account.

Directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, a multi-award-winning director from Australia, Katz transforms in posture and accent from the sassy, young psychic Cookie, to the lazy and obese Bella, from the Hungarian Anna with her ruthless tongue, to a cowboy boyfriend, who had a saddle and a bridle but lived in a city motel, from the Full Jew, Katz’s love interest whose bad personality hid a good heart, to herself, a half-Jew. There are also the Apocalypse Bear and the Hope Dolphin — the fantasy animals that Katz converses with — who are present in her other plays.

Katz draws out the characters from memory with a sense of intimacy because she has got to know them well over years. “Anything I write, I have to immerse myself in it,” she says, mentioning a play called Timeshare, for which she went off on holiday to several resorts and found herself as the only single in a holiday crowd. Her first play, at 14, was about two gigantic talking bats in a cave, who have captured a girl and lead her to the Bat Master who will drink her life essence. “I believe in magic. When I paid the psychics, it worked for a while. Maybe I should have paid them a little more,” she says.

Stories I Want to Tell You in Person will be performed at Abhimanch at NSD today. It will travel to Ahmedabad (Feb 5), Bangalore (Feb 9 and 10), Thiruvananthapuram (Feb 12) and Mumbai (Feb 13)