As human beings, we are obsessed with speed. We are inherently pioneers, always striving to be first – first to the finish line, first to market, first to the future. Whether we are consuming content at 1.5x speed while multitasking, or using AI to “optimize” our lives – the drive to get to something, or somewhere, faster is the engine of human progress. HOLE, to me, is not a story about how fast you can get from Cupertino to Delhi – it’s a story about how fast you can collapse the distance between a dream and the realization of it.
When I first read Sujit Saraf’s unpublished novel, HOLE, I was drawn to it for three big reasons:
First, the ending. Navigating a myriad of characters and places and times, the story boils down to the quiet, relentless ambition of one person. It’s hard to write about this without spoilers, but to see that massive global scale collapse into a single moment of finality – it stayed with me for a long long time after I read the novel (and, from what the audience said, stayed with them for a long long time after they saw the play).
Second, the protagonist, Ravi. I became obsessed with his unwavering self-belief. In a world that demands consensus, Ravi doesn’t quite care – he simply trusts science and himself, even when the whole world is against him. It made me think of ‘visionaries’ of our own time and how it must feel for them to stand in the center of blatant, global criticism and still stay course. It also made me think that, in some ways, I should be more like Ravi.
Third, the novelty. I had never seen anything like this on stage before. Going back to our inherent obsession with being “first”, the chance to bring this story to life was too good to pass – to tell a big, complex and genre-bending story on a 26 ft stage, without Hollywood budget. As I look back, in trying to bring this extremely ambitious project to life, I think I quietly became more like Ravi.
HOLE is a deeply technical story, one that could’ve easily become a PowerPoint presentation or a TEDTalk. The challenge was to ensure that it still remained a piece of theater that our audience could not just understand, but connect to viscerally. It required us to think outside the box of traditional theater and it was my honor to work with an incredible team, both on and off stage, who leaned into the complexity and refused to settle for “good enough”. Their craftsmanship and unwavering faith was like my personal force of gravity in this project – accelerating my ideas when needed and grounding me when I went too far. We set out on a voyage to see if modern theater could honor traditional storytelling, while being cinematic and immersive at the same time.
The curtain will eventually close on this production and Gravity Train will come to a halt, but the spirit of this experiment will remain. HOLE really embodied the idea that the most profound journeys are not measured in miles, but in the audacity to take the first step – that is the longest distance between a dream and the realization of it.
Poulomi Sarkar
Director, Hole.