Ben
Brantley

April 27, 2015

hey become a multitude, the members of this small cast, moving inexorably toward collision. Pacing, circling, brushing up against one another in the opening sequences of Yael Farber’s “Nirbhaya” — the harrowing documentary drama that opened on Sunday night at the Lynn Redgrave Theater — a mere half-dozen performers evoke the explosive contingency of life in an overpopulated city. There’s a chafing sexual friction among these bodies in motion, hovering on the edge of violence. We are, we are told, in bloated, heaving New Delhi. And it is a place where simply riding a bus, for a woman, is to be “passed from one pair of groping hands to another,” to feel that “you’re everyone’s, every day.” Within this restless traffic, a single, slight figure moves across the stage with processional calm. She sings softly to herself, though she never speaks a word. Her name is Jyoti Singh Pandey, and she has been dead for over two years. “Nirbhaya,” Hindi for fearless, is the name by which Ms. Pandey is best known. In this play, that name is spoken as both a lamentation and a rallying cry, and Ms. Pandey’s presence is that of both a ghost and a strength-giving deity.