A series of short plays that dazzled and disappointed in equal measure

An anthology of six short plays, This… Connect featured four adaptations – works of American playwrights

Christopher Durang

,

LB Hamilton

,

Rich Orloff

and

David Ives

— and two originals of Dramanon Hyderabad. Without any common ground, all the six plays, of 10 to 15 minutes each, had plots that revolved around urban social life. While RK Shenoy directed five of the six plays, Harika Vedula took the directorial reigns in her hand for one.

Mrs Sharma
Plot: An adaptation of Christopher Durang’s Mrs Sorken, this play revolved around an accidental

theatre

connoisseur, Mrs Sharma. While delivering a lecture on theatre, she realises that she has lost her notes. So she decides to rely on her memory and delivers an impromptu speech drawing references from her life.
Review: It being the first play of the lot, Sofia Sujad, in and as Mrs Sharma, had the onus of setting the mood for the evening. Her performance though lacked the necessary gravitas. She brough the nervousness of a dignified, middle-aged woman on stage well, but at times, rushed through her dialogues failing to create their desired impact on the audience. This monologue by Durang is all about how an actor improvises the dialogues and that’s what was missing in her performance. In the directorial front, Shenoy chose to stick strictly to the original script and just added a few passing references to Indian languages and actors, in the name of adaptation.

Buyers$ Market

Plot: This play by LB Hamilton unfolds as a conversation between two characters, who bump into each other at a market. Interestingly, they both have price tags hung on to their clothes.
Review: The chemistry between the unnamed characters, played by Jonas David and Aditi Roy Sinha, was on point and their timely exchanges elevated Hamilton’s classic. Director Shenoy’s minimal set held the audience’s focus on the characters and dialogues, but getting his actors to play out majority of the acts on the centre-stage didn’t quite work. For instance, there was a raging scene of the woman slitting her wrist which was confined to the centre stage. If only the actor could’ve relied on some movements and staged the act on the house left, it would’ve been more impactful.

Playwriting 101: A Rooftop Lesson

Plot: This classic by Rich Orloff, is the story of a playwright who explains the art of writing the perfect play through a bunch of conversations between a suicidal man and a Good Samaritan.
Review: The energy brought by Kanishka Dasgupta as the playwright and Shashidhar Kocharlakota and Rahul Premchander playing the role of the suicidal man and Good Samaritan respectively, was infectious on stage. The witty exchanges and energetic slapstick comedy between the characters was the highlight of this one. The freeze frame technique, too, was a delight to watch.

Arabian Nights

Plot: Next was David Ives’ Arabian Nights. It was a love story set in Egypt between a shopper, Norman, and an antique shop owner, Flora and how they converse through a wacky interpreter.
Review: In this one, Jonas as the wacky interpreter chose to use voice modulation while interpreting Flora’s dialogues to accentuate the comic effect. But after a point, it became monotonous and bordered on being draggy. Aditi and Saurabh Sensharma didn’t have much scope as it was the script that was the protagonist in this one.
This Connect

Plot: The last play of the anthology, This Connect was written by RK Shenoy, Rahul Premchander and Saurabh Sensharma. Through three monologues peppered with elements of musical and physical theatre, this play offered a dialogue on technological advancements weaved
together in three monologues.
Review: Using a mix of live musical elements (guitars, aalaps and beat-boxing), the trio tried to present a stark contrast between the play’s subject (technology as an agent of transformation in today's life) and its execution. All three gave out dialogue-heavy monologues highlighting the rise of technology — from the smallest component, electron, to rise of technology and how it effects our lives. Acting-wise they were consumable but the content seemed a little stretched border-lining on being preachy.

Whyducation

Plot: Addressing the ills of contemporary education system and how disconnected it is at times to students’ dreams and aspirations, Whyducation written by Akshita Upadhyayula, Anushka Shah and Harika Vedula was an
attempt at experimental theatre with absurdist elements.
Review: Conceptualised by two 15-year-olds, Akshita Upadhyayula and Anushka Shah, the play is a product of an acting workshop by Dramanon and initially it looked like a misfit in the anthology. The subtelty of writing in the previous works by veterans were missing in the script. However, its
inclusion in the mix was justified by the cast. The amateur duo Akshita and Anushka did a neat job and in the process, highlighted the hard work put in by the director Harika Vedula for all to see. The light play and use of a elements from physical theatre towards the end coupled with well-rehearsed execution of characters, kept this rather half-baked plot somehow afloat.
Verdict:
The first four plays were all well-crafted scripts by acclaimed authors and director Shenoy didn’t have to sweat too much to put across their subtle messages. On the technical front, the recurring feedbacks from the microphones throughout the six plays was a major put off and it made us wonder if the production had a tech run, at all. The light play however was exceptional and it elevated a few otherwise routine scenes. Based on the writing, all the six plays can be distinctly categorised into two parts — tried and tested adaptations and half-cooked originals. The subtlety of writing, use of absurdist elements to convey relevant messages and the ‘intellectual comedy’ which were the hallmark of the first four plays, were intrinsically missing in Dramanon’s two originals. And for us, that was the ‘disconnect’ in This… Connect.