The ‘Thespians’ are back

Te are times when the show just cannot go on, and a lot of performances last weekend were cancelled ��� who would want to go out for an evening of entertainment, when the city was in mourning.
But now, theatre folk, like everybody else in the city, have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and got back to normal.
Rage is doing its latest plays Me, Kash and Cruise and Chaos Theory all of this week; later in this month, Lillete Dubey will celebrate the completion of 50 shows of her Wedding Album with a six-show run.And a new play by Makarand Deshpande is also expected this month. But December belongs to the youth theatre festival ���Thespo���, which is now in its tenth year and going strong as ever. As they proudly say, ���Thespo has grown from a one-evening event to a weeklong multi-city celebration of the best youth theatre that India has to offer.��� It opened with the inauguration of ���The Fourth Wall���, an exhibition of performance photographs by Rafeeq Ellias, Madhusudhan Gadakari, Siddharth Siva and Meenal Agarwal, curated by Mathieu Foss.
Out of 55 plays entered from eight cities, four have been selected to complete for the prizes in various categories. The first is Brihan Maharashtra College���s Dalan (Marathi), based on a short story by DM Mirasdar ��� a comedy set in a village, where a new school master arrives. Marshaal Production���s Bhadmanus (Hindi) is a thriller about the investigation of a crime and a exploration into the nature of truth.
Akvarious Production���s Proof (English) is a Pulitzer prize-winning play by David Auburn, about a brilliant but eccentric mathematician and his daughter. And finally Tincan Production���s Video (English/Hindi/Bengali), a mixed-media effort is an exploration of youth culture, with a huge cast.
Besides the shows there will films, platform performances and really interesting workshops, by theatre professionals like Mohan Agashe (on Grips Theatre), Arghya Lahiri (on theatre lighting), Akash Khurana, Sanjukta Wagh, Hartman de Souza and one on French Theatre by Sarah Doignon.
Like every year, Thespo honours one theatre senior with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and this time it���s Sam Kerawalla, who has been active for over five decades, as an actor, director, stage manager, set and light designer. There is also Unaccustomed Earth by Sophie Larsmon and Jack Holloway, a two-week long workshop that will culminate in a performance at Prithvi Theatre and NCPA during the festival; and a second by Danielle Baker of Pekham Shed, that works on intensive workshops with young people.
Meanwhile, in Delhi, the Old World Theatre Festival, has four plays travelling from Mumbai ��� Hidayat Sami���s All About Women, Jaimini Pathak���s 60 Seconds Deep, Rahul da Cunha���s Chaos Theory and Hanif Patni���s Sach Joota Namak ��� a good glimpse of Mumbai theatre for audiences in the Capital.
Entries are also being invited for the fourth META awards, to be held in Delhi next year, where Mumbai plays cart home quite a few top awards.