Aadyam returns to celebrate friendship

MUMBAI: When Nadir Khan’s

Anand Express

opened late June at the St. Andrews Auditorium, audiences took home something emotional, something nostalgic and something entirely relatable.

The fourth

play

at this year’s edition of

Aadyam

in association with The Times of India that is about

friendship

, death and the journey of youth will return to the stage over July 22 and 23 at the Jamshed Bhabha Auditorium, NCPA.

Wasim played by Chaitnya Sharma is the proverbial Bandra boy who comes from the lower echelons of society and embodies the essence of Mumbai as opposed to the other charactersNeeraj, Anand and Kenny. “Wasim comes from a broken family but has a strong sense of bonding with his friends.. I love how the play looks at the cracks in friendship when boys move out of school into the real world. That is so typical of adolescence,” says Chaitnya.

Based on Carl Miller’s adaptation of

Keith Gray

’s The Ostrich Boys, Anand Express is an action-packed story about the exuberance of youth, loss, hope and the meaning of friendship. Teenagers Kenny, Neeraj and Wasim are determined to fulfill their friend Anand’s dream of going to Gujarat —to “be Anand in Anand”. When he dies unexpectedly, they run away with his ashes on a mission to honour their friendship and to make the wrongs right. The race to get Anand to Anand before the adults catch up with them takes the teenage heroes on an exhilarating, comic and emotional journey.

Vivaan Shah plays Neeraj, the sensible, straight cutter who drives Kenny and Wasim to make the trip to Anand. “The play is a great meditation on friendship, the dynamics between four youngsters and how the youth copes with death. Neeraj is the least eccentric and most rooted. Wasim would be the brawn and Kenny the brain. I am more of a composite of Kenny and Wasim in terms of recklessness,” Vivaan says.

Sukant Goel who plays Anand had to go back a few years, think like a youngster to get into character while Siddharth Kumar who plays Kenny loves how universal the theme of the play is and feels he shares many character traits with him.