How does one evaluate Parnab Mukherjee’s ‘trans-creation’ of the Eugene O’ Neill oddity, ‘Hughie’? The original, which the American playwright never saw performed in his lifetime, was in his own words “written more to be read than staged”. It’s set in a seedy Manhattan hotel lobby in 1928. Hustler Erie Smith stumbles in drunk and delivers a monologue to the disinterested night clerk Hughes, who’s replaced the recently deceased Hughie, his much-lamented confidante. The play is about Erie’s idea of himself, first and foremost.

In Parnab Mukherjee’s One World Theatre production of ‘Waiting for Hughie’, premiered in a tiny, half-renovated room at the Yala Maya Kendra, little trace of O’Neill remains. The largely silent Hughes is supplanted by a poetry-spouting Rajkumar Pudasaini and the director himself supplements the goings-on with audio, video and comic rants about lower-income groups in South Asia. Erie, played by a swaggering Aashant Sharma, remains as O’Neill meant him to be, except he too indulges in poetry (Buddhisagar and Momila Joshi, to counter Pudasaini’s Bhupi Sherchan). A South Asian always has a poem in his pocket, Mukherjee notes drolly, while his characters excavate metal boxes full of paper boats and strew them about the floor, almost as if to give the audience members, drawn up tightly over Erie’s narrow strip of concrete, something to look at other than each other’s bemused faces. Unfortunately, Sharma’s thick Nepali accent renders all but the gist of his ramble incoherent. But perhaps this is the point of ‘Waiting for Hughie’, a three-way rant on the individual (Sharma), Nepal (Pudasaini) and South Asia (Mukherjee), backed by the folk ensemble ‘Night’. It’s funny and thought-provoking, and also frustrating, but I can think of many worse ways to spend an hour.

‘Waiting for Hughie’ is playing at the Theatre Village in Lazimpat from July 2 to 4 at 1230pm.