This play wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but KissaGo pulled it off

Plot: Written by award-winning actor and playwright Manav Kaul, The Park is a story of three characters — a law graduate, a school teacher and a government employee who squabble over three benches in a park. The park and benches in question are metaphors for personal space, through which the play highlights many pertinent issues plaguing the modern India — shrinking of public spaces in cities, migration, ownership, urban melancholia and isolation among others — even as the characters lock horns to lay claim to the seats they desire. Review: The play begins with three empty benches in a park. Soon the central characters occupy them, one after another. Each one has his own reasons to be in the park and wants a particular bench to sit on. And thus begin a series of arguments as the trio seek to claim ownership of their favourite seats. The exchanges between the characters highlight the differences in their caste, creed and religion initially, but soon international global issues such as the Arab War, Kashmir insurgency, Naxalism and Tibetan independence movement and so on too come into the fold. Filled with seemingly witty yet loaded affirmations, the parley also assumes a weighty psychological dimension too, albeit on a voyeuristic level. Symbolism in theatre is a tricky thing. Especially, if you are staging a play like The Park, which has a set that itself holds a symbolic value, a certain degree of expertise is required for its smooth execution. And this KissaGo production had it in director and theatre veteran Shubhas Gupta. By not going overboard in trying to beautify things, Shubhas stuck to the pragmatic and direct approach of the script and let the play move forward at its own pace.The actors, spot on with their timing and tempo of dialogue deliveries, were a delight to watch. So was the stage direction, which carried the play on its shoulders. All the three central characters — Jay Jha as the government employee, Abhijeet Despande as Uday (the law student) and Suresh Kumar as the school teacher, were just faultless throughout the 60-minute show. Their on-stage chemistry was indicative of the time they had spent on the script and it was fun to watch them on stage.Though the cast did a fine job in keeping the humour alive throughout, their fluidity and pace dipped while staging the serious scenes. The use of lighting and recurring piano theme as the background score too added to the woes, especially when Abhijeet was narrating his backstory. Nonetheless, the play gives enough food for thought for the audience and leaves them in splits as well.Verdict: The play stayed true to Manav’s original and managed to use humour as an attractive decoy to put across some serious messages to the audience. Though touted as a light-hearted comedy, the play actually is a heady mix of different forms of theatre including comedy of ideas, morals and characters. It’s tightly knit in terms of narrative and execution and hence deserves a thumbs up.