Tongue-tied

HYDERABAD: A Harvard degree might win you scholarly recognition, but can it teach you how to profess your love to someone? It certainly did not happen in the case of Sunita (Anahita Uberoi) and Mukesh (Zafar Karachiwala), the two protagonists of Rahul Da Cunha's globally acclaimed play `Chaos Theory' that was staged at Shilpa Kala Vedika on the fourth day of the Times Hyderabad Festival on Monday.
Stepping on to stage, the two actors playing academicians stumbled and erred each time they made an attempt to express their feelings for each other, their intellect notwithstanding. The first scene of the play set in the Sixties had posters from the decade and those of Che forming the backdrop, and with the two protagonists engaged in a literary discussion, quoting scholars, particularly William Shakespeare. The play's narrative swung between the past and the present, as the duo revisited their days of youth. The icons of the decades gone by changed from Elvis Presley to Bob Dylan to the Beatles but what didn't change was the duo's inability to come up with the simplest words to express their love for each other. At one point those sitting in the audience almost felt like shaking the characters out of their `literary' reverie and help them spell out the words and end their misery.
But the male protagonist himself showed he didn't need help as he remained unable to tell Sunita how he felt even when he attended her marriage much later in the play as a witness, disappointing her with his silence, a disappointment that would revisit Sunita again, and again.
If the '60s showed them moving on to pursue their individual academic dreams, the '70s showed them meeting once again, when Sunita is with her poet husband, who brings in the best laughs at the theatre with his composition that goes like `your samosa my vagina.'
If the lighter moments evoked laughs, some dialogues struck an emotive chord with the audience. They could have been tied down by their incorrigible habit of theorising the happenings in their life, like in literature and remained largely inarticulate in their love, but they gradually warm up to their feelings for each other, with Sunita naming her child Mukesh. At another point, Sunita tells Mukesh, "You are recklessly wayward but always keep coming back to me.''
The cathartic moment came with the Kishore Kumar number `Ye Shaam Mastani' playing in the background, when a divorced Sunita meets Mukesh, also separated from a student he had only recently married. And finally, Sunita confesses to Mukesh that she loved him but he still remains quiet, and lets her go again when her husband comes back to reclaim her in his life, the disappointment repeated once more in her life.
There is no denying the fact that it were these poetry-like dialogues that kept the audience hooked all through the one hour 20 mins of the play that opens at St Stephen's College, New Delhi, somewhere in the `60s and later moves to America, as the date changes from 1960 to 1970 to 1980.
If the play managed to cover three decades, the packed to capacity auditorium at Shilpa Kala Vedika had viewers wondering how time flew. As the play ended, the hooked audience grudgingly left the venue, commending the performances and reliving the magical moments Rahul Da Cunha's play created in such a short time.
Anahita's performance as the scholarly woman married to another man though much in love with her old friend was hugely applauded. Continuing her journey of power-packed shows like in previous plays such as `Glass Menagerie,' in which she played a withdrawn, disabled girl and `Going Solo' (her monologue was much appreciated in this) she has delivered her best even in Cunha's `Chaos Theory' that has been among the finalists in BBC's World Playwriting Contest in 2007. Zafar, of course, lives up to the expectations of his director who in many interviews called him the "best theatre artiste in English". The supporting cast, played by Shaana Levy and Sohrab Ardeshir, also did great justice to their roles.