From Many to One

Throughout LiCata and Chong’s Cocktail, multiple characters accumulate onstage combined by increasingly frantic action and noise until one key turning point where all leaves except one: Dr. Krisana Kraisintu. On one hand, the cleared stage except for a sole working scientist and the silence save the date people announcing passage of time, is a shocking contrast to the complete flood of sights and sounds earlier and reflects the stark aloneness of Dr. Krisana in her quest to make HIV drugs as well as the virtually universal fear or unwillingness of everyone else to take on the cause of AIDS. The visual of one woman standing while others have fled not only highlights her moral and mental fortitude, but also aligns her somewhat with the likewise deserted AIDS patients she is trying to save. This sudden shift from multiplication to singular acts almost like a filter, revealing the true colors and mettle of a person, differentiating the truly exceptional from the merely hardworking and conscientious who are ready to contribute when success was assured like in the Staff Buzz scene or the strong only as a pack as in the High Noon scene. Dr. Krisana remains resolved even when the job is stigmatized, unpopular, uncertain, dangerous, and even if she has to “go it alone.”

On the other hand, the turning point when a “cocktail” of cast members becomes one person mirrors the making of the drug itself and perhaps foretells its success. From many chemicals, one pill. The ticking stops as if for Krisana time stands still, and the date persons’ calls are for the benefit of the audience rather than hers. Without the continuous ticking, the connotations of a timer or a time bomb stops, and the pressure built from the beginning of the play shifts into only the marking of time as if the play induces its audience to collectively hold its breath for the duration. The repetitive motif remains, however, but transformed into the repetitiveness and persistence of lab work where the experimenter must perform the same tasks again and again until surrender or breakthrough. Once the turn is complete, there is a new reality. The exponentially multiplying dots, now echoed in the circular pill, have disappeared as if to say that this tablet will help to reduce the numbers of AIDS patients.

The turning point scene marks the difference between a failure whom people are ready to ridicule (which foretaste we see in the mockery of Meechai) and a hero whom people are ready to attach themselves to and ride the laurel, and in this sense it is extremely critical. Personally, Dr. Krisana has put her reputation, career, and livelihood on the line. But that is nothing to the public stakes: hundreds of thousands of lives, attitudes, national policies, millions of baht. Where all this goes changes with the arrival of the cocktail. The HIV sun can be halted in its rise as a different dawn breaks. While Cocktail celebrates multiple efforts coming together, it also pays tribute to the power of an individual, and this extraordinary moment where we see from many turned into one, though spare and rather quiet, is that applause.

Medicine without Borders

Beginning with and remaining in Thailand, about a Thai pharmacist, Thai politicians, Thai AIDS patients, Thai society, food and culture, Vince LiCata and Ping Chong’s Cocktail suddenly moves to Africa toward the end of the play. This shift threatens to break the unity of the piece if not for its bold grasp of the central theme. Prior to this turning point, we are treated to a cognitive jolt already when Dr. Krisana as an adult is able to visit her Grandmother and speak to her as in the opening scene where the nun promises the six-year-old girl that “you can be with me whenever you want.” The echo of this and of her teaching about helping those less advantaged, is felt throughout Dr. Krisana’s scenes and most significantly in this continental move to show that the granddaughter has fully absorbed those lessons, making them the play’s most constant theme. This shift to Pharmakina paradoxically emblematizes commitment rather than shiftiness. It is the most telling test of Krisana’s character, demonstrating as it does that by moving to Africa she is more steadfast to her principles and promise than Director Likhit who stays put. The contradictory imagery versus meaning marks the biggest intellectual provocation in the play, asking the audience as it does Dr. Krisana, what science is for and who “the disadvantaged” really are.

The geographical change expands the story from a biography to a human history and study. It emphasizes that the nature of science or law or humanity is international or global. Despite the shift in time (three years), place (Bukavu, DRC), sound (jungle and machine guns), the play’s heart never changes. With this brilliant turning point, Cocktail reveals itself to be truly universal, not about one woman or one country, but humanity wherever that may be.