Double delight for city's theatre lovers

KOLKATA: A serpentine queue stood outside GD Birla Sabhagar an hour before Wedding Album opened the Culture Curry section of Times Kolkata Festival to a packed hall. And why not? Last year Lillette Dubey bagged the Best Actress award at Madrid for Bow Barracks Forever, directed by our very own Anjan Dutt. That makes her special to this city. And then she directs her daughter Ira, who recently debuted onscreen in The President Is Coming, in her first production of a Girish Karnad play.Double delight!
Wedding Album continues Lillette's pursuit of English plays by contemporary Indian playwrights. And, like Dance Like A Man, Thirty Days in September, and Sammy, she has taken this play that has completed 50 shows, to Singapore, Muscat, Pakistan, UK, US. The international appeal is foregone, for "It looks at today's India, a real fusion of traditional and global attitudes ," says Ira, who assisted with the script and direction.
The play enters the lives of a Saraswat Brahmin family that's organising the younger daughter's marriage with an NRI. And it observes how weddings divide families ! Lillette had a feel of the subject when she acted in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding. However, "the only common factor is that a wedding throws people together in a concentrated way, so the past comes tumbling out," explains Ira.
The play comes out of Karnad's own observations when his sister got married about 30 years ago. He saw his family gathering together, their interpersonal dynamics, their tensions. He found it a combination of "celebration and anxiety." He tucked it away in his mind, and when Wedding Album appeared, theatrebuffs found it far removed from Karnad's mythology or history-oriented plays.
To unveil our changing attitude towards marriages, Karnad sets the Chekovian events in a globalised , techno-driven India where the NRI groom longs for a traditional wife while her mother hopes the daughter won't just marry and bear children. "It's not heavy, yet full of pithy comments," says Lillette from Delhi.
Ira too admires the way Karnad adapts the events to ask: "How do you define culture today?" It can't be stuck in the past nor be blind aping of the West. But it's the conversations , not the storyline that makes the play what it is: A slice of today's India, with Internet sex chats, pop spiritualism, adolescent crushes, arranged marriages, repressed sexualities...
"Nothing in the play is black or white," says Ira. "All the relationships have a lot of complexities, each character has ambiguities, and some tracks are unresolved." And Ira just loves the tension this gives rise to. "The subtle message can raise a laugh yet make viewers delve deeper and debate the issues ," feels Lillette.
Karnad, on his part, has appreciated her direction. "In the second half the language was very raw. Sometimes making words work on stage calls for changes. I must say she has made it very decent ," he reportedly said.
The ensemble piece repeatedly drew applause for the strong performances by Utkarsh Mazumdar, Smita Jaikar, Pravashi Das, Satchit Puranik, Geetika Amin, Amar Talwar , Seema Azmi, Raghav Chanana and - of course - Ira Dubey.