The Plays

Date : 11th April 2017
Directors : Arjun Mahendru and Utkarsh Agarwal

Assistant Directors: Aakash Sharma and Mukundan Singh
Production Managers : Pradyumn Awasthi, Alanckrit Jain and Rishabh Gupta
Playwright : Vijay Tendulkar
Form : Stage Play
Type : Semester Production

Cast

Sukhatme: Shivank Garg

Mrs. Kashikar: Shashwata Sinha

Mr. Kashikar: Durjai Sethi

Balu Rokde: Ayush Raj

Leela Benare: Aditi Agarwal

Samant: Anirjit Hom Roy

Ponkshe: Aditya Vikram

Karnik: Apoorv Singh Chandel

The Play

"There is a higher court than the court of justice, which is the court of conscience."

If it was remotely possible to summarize the soul of this play in a single line, the aforementioned line is the one that comes closest to encapsulating the essence of it.

Miss Leela Benare, the chirpy & lively protagonist, kick starts the play with her quick humor and purposeful flirtatious jibes at the guileless Samant, with a hidden yet harmless ulterior motive. Samant, is the helper who is in charge to show the venue of the play to the theater company, of which Benare & other arriving members are a part of.

Mr. Kashikar, the owner of the theater company and the most influential character on stage approves the suggestion of making Samant a part of the play, tending to the absence of a few regular actors of their company. In order to facilitate the process of helping the theatrically inexperienced Samant learn the basics of acting for their show scheduled that night, they present to him a trial-run of a play, a mock play. The play is not scripted beforehand but is an on-screen adaptation and the story builds on as various actors lend different dimensions to the plot. With a basic premise set-up of Benare being accused of child-abortion, the play builds up to discussing the reasons behind the abortion, vilifying and objectifying the character of the female lead.

Mr. Kashikar assumes the role of the Judge, and Sukhatme a lawyer in real life, confidently assumes the roles of both the prosecutor and the defense lawyer, owing to the dearth of actors. As the remnant actors- Mrs. Kashikar, Ponkshe, Karnik & Rokde, playing witnesses, come up and narrate real-life incidents that act as build-ups to the story and present a convincing conviction of Benare, lines begin to blur between fiction and reality. In the mock play, Benare was accused of engaging in pre-marital activities of sexual nature and of trying to attempt suicide after no one responded to her pleas. Wherein, in real life too, Benare had encountered the same issues.

Since the play actors, who were merely improvising, didn’t realize that their accusations however true they might be, were the actualities of their fellow actor’s life. Benare, helplessly watching her personal traumas unfolding during the mock play in front of everyone, suffers intense mental agony as it confronted her with reality. In the end, Benare, or more accurately her inner voice, questions the society and tries to protect her sanctity. Tired of being questioned for her character, Benare ultimately breaks down and succumbs to what society and life have imposed on her.

This masterpiece by Vijay Tendulkar transcends time and captivates viewers through generations because of its immense social relevance- cruelty against women, especially single women, a societal evil that still permeates human thinking.

Memories of the play:

For the first time in a while, the directors used the "committed memory" technique- where the actors instead of memorizing the dialogues before hand, were blocked while delivering dialogues from their script, gradually getting the essence of the lines from verbal and action cues.
Before the actual blocking of the play began, the directors sat with the entire cast and clarified the doubts regarding any event in the script, reading the same again, line by line.
"Running situation" was played few times, with the directors making the cast enter various situations in their characters with the objective of seeing how they would tackle different situations in their characters.
The character sketches were kept in focus, their equations with each other, their history, their relationships, everything was to be specified by the cast.They were then questioned by the directors regarding even the most trivial details, let alone major character traits.