A name-stealing monkey, a man-eating cat and a surprisingly poetic firefly prowled the stage at Harishree Vidyalaya’s auditorium on Sunday.
Crea-Shakthi’s Spotlight Initiative unveiled its first of two annual cycles with Urban Mirage, a set of 10 short plays woven around Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s tales.
Over 40 actors, including beginners and amateurs put on human and animal masks to depict dark emotions and murky thoughts. Rehearsed for two months and spanning a 100 minutes, the production dealt with familiar feelings such as love, pain, loss and grief.
“Murakami is an extremely abstract writer,” Ganapathi Ramanathan, one of the playwrights, said. “Putting his works on stage was really hard, because you had to read between the lines and give form to his ideas.”
The scenes were surreal and included; an old-world bistro transporting its patrons to old memories, with the present reality parallelly being staged, a guilty couple hopping onto a train to Greece to avoid their families and falling into a moral grey area in their relationship, and a mourning mother waiting and watching for her dead son to surf again on the shores of Hawaii.
The lighting conveyed both intense and soft emotions, accompanied by ominous music. “I recognised two or three plays that went with the books,” Ajitha Ramesh, an audience member, said. “All of them had a Murakami feel — a sense of strangeness.”
The challenge was to train beginners to do these abstract scenes justice. “We needed to experiment with what we do and what we teach them in the 60-day program,” Meenu Lakshmi Srinivasan, one of the directors of the plays, said. “I thought Murakami would be a good step forward.”
Working with freshers for an abstract production was a gamble but it eventually paid off, according to Srinivasan and her co-director George Varghese. The actors explored new spectrum of emotions. “What we see here in today’s civilisation is that we don’t understand emotions that we haven’t come across,” Krishnan said. “When you learn emotions, you change yourself as a person.”
The Spotlight Initiative will reveal a new theme come December.
