List with Name, Director and Synopsis
1. Name: Three Short Plays: The Last Annal of Alamgir, Karna and Aftermath
Director: Avaan Patel
The Plays
The Last Annal of Alamgir
A portrait of an Emperor in his declining years, Hosokte’s Alamgir is a personage who inhabits the speculative, poetic space of possibility between history and fiction. He is and is not the Mughal tyrant Aurangzeb, who goes over memories of his entire life until he reaches a point where he lies dying, fighting an enemy who cannot be dominated. We also see him invoking his angel – a character who he refers to but cannot speak to directly and with whom he communicates most freely.
Karna
Inspired by Karnabharam, a fragment written by the ancient Sanskrit dramatist Bhasa, Hoskote’s Karna faces audiences as a contemporary figure driven by mixed compulsions, anxieties and convictions. The action of the play unfolds on what turns out to be the last day of Karna’s life.
Aftermath
Conceived of as a ‘score for six voices’, the setting in this play is of a post-apocalyptic future in which an unnamed catastrophe has destroyed human civilization as we know it. In the ruins, six survivors, each damaged by these events, come upon an archive and upon each other. It turns out they are figures from various periods and societies in history – Ghalib and Gandhari, Indra and Shahid, Sleeper and Lost. They address each other in fragments of texts that they half remember. Gradually, from this meandering, circling, malingering cross talk, there develops a portrait of the futility and sorrow of War.
2. Achin Gaoner Gatha
Director: H. Kanhailal
The Play
The story revolves around the life of a young girl whose mother dies while giving birth. Although her father loves her deeply, her life is made miserable by the abusive and cruel behaviour of her step-mother. Once, when her father is away, her step-mother inflicts such violence on her that she is almost crippled. Just then she is rescued by a flock of birds and carried away to a distant land. When her father returns and finds his daughter missing, he takes his wife and goes to the temple of goddess Kali to pray for her return. While at the temple the step-mother, for the first time in her life, starts experiencing the emotions and feelings of a mother. Filled with remorse, she is transformed and begins a new life.
3. Aisa Kehte Hain
Playwright & Director: Manav Kaul
The Play
Aisa Kehte Hain can be best described as a love story comprising a liar, a cop, two runaway circus kids; a guy called Chai; a man resolved on suicide; another willing to help him in return of money; a bunch of pigeons who occasionally feel the need to break into song and dance; and a lonely crow with an identity crisis. At the farthest end of a deserted railway station a young man spins a story for his love. Gradually the story takes on a life of its own and becomes a testimony to the inexplicable moments in life – the odd broken pieces that never quite fit in, but that are nonetheless preserved, in case someday we find the right place for them. But can all these characters truly make a love story? That too, without love? And can such a story have a happy ending? That’s what the play tries to find out.
4. Andha Yug
Director: Pravin Kumar Gunjan
(No Synopsis)
5. Are You Home Lady Macbeth?(Inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth)
Script & Direction: Maya Krishna Rao
The Play
The play, Macbeth, belongs to world where kings, generals, soldiers……and witches coexist – fighting battles, casting spells, murdering, and also eating and a lot of drinking! In keeping with that spirit, this show is about a witch-like woman who playfully creates the characters of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth. Somewhere along the way she finds herself drawn into the skin of Lady M. But a witch is a witch and belongs not to a palace. Witch and queen cannot coexist in the same person for long. So she must either ‘rub herself’ out of existence or refind herself in another form……
Some scenes from the original play have been recreated, like the post murder scene between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and the dinner sequence with Banquo’s ghost. But with a difference….
The effort, in this production is to swing from the comic to the tragic, and all that lies in between, seamlessly, much like the way witches do.
6. Ashang Eina Aton
Director: S. Thaninleima
Play
The play tells the tragic love story of Ashang, the son of a rich family, and Aton, the daughter of a poor widow. Despite knowing the depth of their son’s feelings, Ashang’s family refuses to accept her as their daughter-in-law. One day Aton’s mother receives a marriage proposal for her from the son of the neighboring King, and she accepts. On the day of the wedding she invites Ashang, gets him drunk, and marries off her daughter. When Ashang wakes up it is too late. Realizing that he has lost his beloved Aton forever, he stops eating and starts becoming increasingly weak. Finally, when all else fails, his mother goes to Aton’s mother for help. Moved by her plight, somehow Aton’s mother manages to bring Aton to meet Ashang at his house. Over there Aton feeds him poisoned rice and wine and kills herself too. As Ashang’s parents realize that their son is dead they finally accept their defeat at the hands of his love.
7. Behad Nafrat Ke Dino Mein
Direction: Daulat Vaid
Play
The play revolves around the relationship between an Indian, Hindu boy and a Muslim, Pakistani girl who meet each other on a social networking website. Gradually they start enjoying each other’s company and fall in love. The boy’s father is an office bearer in the Hindu right wing organization, the RSS, while the girl’s brother is a religious fundamentalist who is a member of the Taliban. Given this background the couple has a nikah-e-masnuna or telephonic marriage, in which they pretend that the boy is Muslim. The details of his religious identity, however, are revealed when the girl’s family visits her marital home after the marriage. The two families now become even more consumed by hatred and religious fanaticism. The play imagines a world where tools like social networking sites help in destroying misconceptions between countries and communities and in creating a less hatred-ridden world.
8. Belibaas
Playwright & Director: Aziz Quraishi
Play
Belibaas is a play about men, women, th society they live in and the options they have. Different anecdotes about their relationships and about the notion of free-choice, give us a glimpse of their realities in which they are reflected as both victims and victimizers. In depicts on a day-to-day basis, how simple, socially and morally defined relationships in the office, neighborhood, and even at home, can get twisted, and how they can end up violating traditionally accepted boundaries. The play raises questions on who the victim or the victimizer is, while also exploring notions of blame, gender, choice and freedom.
9. Bharatkatha (Sourced from the Oral Epics of the country, Pandavani &
Jhumur)
Script & Direction: Manish Mitra
The Play
During the extensive application oriented research of the traditional Pandavani, Jhumur and Chou folk forms, the Kasba Arghya group came up with the idea of Bharatkatha, a theatrical performance exploring the energy sources of folk theatres from different parts of the country, all revolving around the Mahabharata. The episode chosen is of Arjun’s penetration of the Chakravyuh, his heroic battle against the Kauravas and his tragic death. The performance bases itself on the Mahabharata as an oral epic, while embedding it within Eastern classical music, by employing folk forms and by retaining the authenticity of these forms. Apart from the core cast, a group of Chou dancers from the remote village of Purulia have also participated in the production.
10. Black Orchid
Direction: Toijam Shila Devi
The Play
Located in a small, fictitious village engulfed by violent and militant activities, the play looks at the lives and experiences of the people who suffer these losses. As mute spectators watching loved ones die, homes destroyed and life altered in ways never to be recovered from, the minds and bodies of these innocent villagers become the sites on which battles are waged. The play focuses specially on women and children caught up in armed conflicts and aims to reflect the manner in which their memories and hearts get indelibly scarred by the inhuman atrocities they experience and witness.
11. Bol Senai Taloike
Director: Bidyawati Phukan
The Play
A group of young Bihu performers from Upper Assam travel to perform in Borpeta, a place in Lower Assam. Here they encounter the traditional Satriya culture started by Shrimata Sankar Deva. So influenced are they by this new art form that they learn it before returning to their villages. On their way back the Bihu artistes discuss several incidents that had happened along their journey and that had touched them in different ways, each one teaching them different lessons about life. The journey they make, therefore, helps them understand the varying facets of human existence as it moves between love and compassion, anger and competition, forgiveness and tolerance.
12. Buzak-e-Chini wa Gurg (The Wolf and the Goat)
Director: Abdul Haq Haqjoo
The Story
Buzak-e-Chini (a goat) and her three kids Angak, Bangak and Klola Sangak live in a jungle. One day she has to leave her kids alone and before leaving she warns them of the dangers of opening the door for strangers, telling them repeatedly not to do so in any circumstances. Yet, despite her warnings, a clever wolf succeeds in fooling the kids and tricks them into opening the door for him. With the door open he steals them and decides to make a delicious dinner out of them. The play then looks at what happens when the mother goat returns and on her attempts to retrieve her children from the clutches of the clever wolf.
Kharpesht & Khargoosh (The Hedgehog and the Rabbit)
Direction: Abdul Habib Tagmim.
The Story
A hedgehog couple live happily together in a field. One day a rabbit comes along and accidentally steps on the hedgehog, hurting himself. Angered by this interference, he tells the hedgehogs to leave the land and move somewhere else. Just then a raven comes along and on hearing the matter suggests a race between the unequal competitors. The plot then takes an unlikely turn as the race plays itself out.
13. The Caine Mutiny Court Martial
Director: Naseeruddin Shah
Play
This play, based on a World War II novel, is a complex portrait of what war and its accompanying stress does to people. It deals with only that section of the novel that narrates the ordeal of Lt. Stephen Maryk when he, having relieved his Commanding Officer during a typhoon, is on trial for mutiny. As the play proceeds the ploy become muddier with the ambivalent views expressed, none of them being the absolute truth. What is revealed, instead, are the fissures that appear in the psyches of men as they are called upon to do inhuman tasks. The play also questions the possibility of ‘Absolute Truth’ and asks who, given the inevitability of war , would be best suited to engage with it. This is not just a war play – basing itself on the given that war is hell, it explores the question of its inevitability because of the way human nature is.
14. Chanakya
Direction: Manoj Joshi
The Play
Chanakya brings to life the great visionary and statesman from History, but in a modern context. Realizing the threat of invasion and conquest and equally driven by the the desire to , chanakya decided that it was imperative to create a authority figure that could rule the subcontinent as well as the hearts of his subjects. It was his brilliant maneouverings and the integrity of his intentions that eventually saw the dawn of a new era in the shape of the Mauryan empire. The second tun of the Hindi version of the play was started immediately after the 26/11 terro attack on Mumbai and the first show was dedeicated to the memory of martyr Constable Tukaram Umbale.
15. Chanda Mama Door Ke
Director: M.K. Raina
The Play
Chanda Mama Door Ke is a play based on an Italian play Letters to an Unborn Child written by Oriana Fallaci. It is a dialogue between a mother and her unborn child. A modern, educated and liberal woman of today, the protagonist of the play raises questions about the rights of an unborn child. She starts talking to the child the day she conceives and she continues to do so, treating her unborn chills as an intelligent, equal, individual being who can both comprehend as well as respond to the range of social, political and personal issues that are being discussed with it. As the play progresses so too does the dialogue, gradually moving beyond the mother-child paradigm onto a new level of human understanding and communication.
16. Chronotopia
Direction/Choreography: Jayachandran Palazhy
Play
Inspired by the famous Tamil epic Chilapathikaram, this multi-media performance takes the audience through an episodic journey traversing layers of temporal and physical locations that often defy conventional notions of space and chronology. The performance attempts to create a complex non-linear dramaturgy by placing deliberately stylized physical movements in a digitally constructed and changing stage architecture. These movements are abstractions of images derived from contemporary experiences, imagination and memories, organized to create a sensorial journey without chronology. Anchored on a central female character represented by three dancers, the piece journeys through rural, urban, historical, contemporary and even mythic contexts, as time dissolves and dislocates, infusing the landscape with tenderness and loss. The performance also explores how images from ordinary existence – childhood, friendship, marriage, motherhood, conflict and death – encounter inexplicable interventions and forces that alter life and catapult it out of orbit.
17. Darjiparar Marjinara
Direction: Koushik Sen
Play
Moving through the narrow lanes of Sonagachi, one of the largest red-light areas of Asia, the play looks at the diversity of people – brokers, policemen, clients and prostitutes – whose lives lie encapsulated and touched by the socio-political and personal dynamics of the place. As the history of Sonagachi is revealed through them, we realize that the play is not about prostitution and physical desire but rather about a form of globalization in which everything is commodified. Revealing the dark side of the so-called free world, the plot explores how everything can be bought in today’s world - Creativity, Ethics, Trust, Love, Faith - and how there is a certain darkness that is spreading through all barriers of time and space.
18. Democrac(ies)
Director: Florence Bermond
The Play
Democracies gathers several texts written by Harold Pinter: short plays, sketches as well as poetry from his War Collection. The performance, which draws from a cast of diverse origins, mobilizes all the senses while proposing a universe between the borders of theatre, dance and cinema. The different personalities and cultures of the cast feed the dramaturgic construction and open up a universal dimension. Pinter’s words are pronounced in several languages, creating a kind of global echo that aims at becoming a polyphony appealing to freedom. Beauty joins atrocity; nonsense and absurdity get mixed up with violence, while the corrosive humor of Pinter denounces the barbaric modernity, thought manipulations and dysfunctions of the contemporary world.
19. Putaliko Ghar (A Doll’s House)
Director: Sunil Pokharel
The Play
Written by Henrik Ibsen in 1879, A Doll’s House is believed by many to be the first true feminist play. Revolving around the life of Nora Helmer, the play takes an unflinching look at the traditional roles of men and women in 19th-century marriage, culminating in an unexpected final stand taken by the wife. It explores concepts of unconditionality, gender roles, the objectification of women as mere playthings, the various forms of self-discovery; and the value of self-awareness and selfhood for human beings in general and women in particular.
20. Ecdysis: The Snake Sheds its Skin
Concept & Direction: Arjun Raina
Play
Ecdysis: The Snake Sheds its Skin is the story of three people from India – the mysterious uncle, his niece and her husband – living in Linz, Austria. All three roles are played by Mr. Raina, who keeps switching languages as he takes on the different personas. Ecdysis is the story of Indians trying to shed their skins and gain new identities. At times they are successful in this ambition and at times unsuccessful. The play explores the pleasures and pains of living life in another country far from the sense of security as well as, often, the responsibility, that the homeland is always associated with.