It’s rocking!

Deepa Gahlot / TNN / Sep 20, 2007, 00:00 IST

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New plays, competitions, workshops and awards, there’s no slowing down Mumbai theatre.

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Shomshuklla (TOI Photo)New plays, competitions, workshops and awards, there’s no slowing down Mumbai theatre.
Singer and poet Shomshuklla, whose last play ‘I’ve Gone Marking’ was well-received, is ready with her new play ‘Flawless’ rather fast. Besides writing, designing and directing this one, she’s acting (for the first time in Mumbai) in it too, with veteran Dolly Thakore, Sohini Mukherjee and Sugandha Garg.
The play consists of three stories, the theme of which is women in love — one is searching for it, one loses it, and the third finds it and realises its futility. A lot of playwrights do a first play as an exploration of the medium, it’s when they do a second, you know they are the ones likely to stay on.
Talking of second plays, Divya Jagdale’s ‘End of Season’, directed by Pushan Kripalani, opened last week to considerable appreciation. It’s an interesting exploration of life under stress in a Gujarati household, where two sisters (Trishla Patel, Shivani Tanksale) visiting their parents (Reema Lagoo- Sheikh Sami Usman) from the US, dig up old grievances.

It’s a spare (maybe too much so), elegant production, punctuated with Divya’s witty writing. The revelation here was Reema Lagoo, doing her first English play, getting the best lines and walking away with the play, in spite of working with seasoned stage artistes.
Maybe a few tracks were left unexplored and at 80 minutes it's too short and hurriedly wrapped up, but ‘End of Season’ makes for an interesting watch.
It’s been 20 years since Om Katare and his Yatri have been holding annual theatre workshops. They are taking applications for this year’s workshop now, which as usual covers every aspect of theatre and acting (speech, diction, body language, improvisation, imagination), as can be covered in 30 days, the whole exercise culminating in the performance of two short plays with the participants.

Katare’s workshops throw up actors for his own productions too, so he's never short of talent. That’s why he is planning two fresh productions for the Yatri festival early next year.
Meanwhile, out of the 30 colleges that entered the IPTA inter-collegiate drama competition, six were selected for the finals this weekend, after rigorous elimination rounds.
According to IPTA’s general secretary Shaili Sathyu, the entries this year showed a remarkable social awareness. The choice of subjects was also varied and wide-ranging, from students issues, caste rural education, farmer suicides, terrorism, communal riots, workers problems, globalisation, atrocities against women and so on.
There is a really unusual play about a cock-eyed boy and his problems. Nobody on the professional theatre circuit must have come up with an original idea like this.
Waman Kendre, who is very active on Mumbai’s stage and is also director of Mumbai University’s Academy of Theatre Arts, was conferred with the Waman: Daya Pawar Smriti Puraskar earlier this week. The right man for the honour!

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