It took Prashanth Nair eight months to write Remember Remember. “I had a conversation with my mother on the stories she heard from her grandmother. I wondered why those stories weren’t passed down to me and realised that most of the stories we grew up on were set in villages and not in the cities we live in.”
As a response to an increasingly commercialised, tech-driven city space, devoid of stories, Nair penned urban folktales. “The script was initially written as text, not as direction, like how it is in a play. So it took six months for the stories to unfold on stage. I wanted to create a landscape of a city and the challenge lay in how that could be done,” says Nair, winner of The Hindu MetroPlus Playwright of the Year Award (2012-2013).
He explains the plot of each play:
Watching an audience watch a play
It is as the title suggests. The actors look at the audience just like how the audience looks at actors and they connect over stories.
The Gatekeeper of Secrets
There are so many forgotten stories. I wondered where have all them gone? In the play, the stories escape to an imaginary place, where they are guarded from being let out, a metaphor for the stories being protected from our tendency of reducing everything into snippets and memes that are consumed instantly on whatsapp and social media.
ZenTen
This play is set in the near future and is about an urban couple. They have access to an app that enables them to go back in time by 10 seconds, so that they can correct anything they might have done wrong.
The Pied Piper Remembers
It is a take on The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The text has been re-imagined as disillusionment with the state. Was the text talking about rats at all or were they talking about people who are refugees or migrants who are not wanted. Why do we call them rats? Why not dragons?
Everybody needs an imaginary friend
It is about a woman in a vulnerable position. She wonders why an imaginary childhood friend visits her at a crucial moment in her life? No one else can see this friend. The imaginary friend is a metaphor for a coping mechanism. While those around her think she needs help, the question is does this ‘condition’ need to be ‘cured’?
The woman who lost her stories
What if one day you forget the stories that shaped your identity and those that had an impact on your life? This is different from losing your memory.
This happens to a woman who wakes up one day to find she has lost her stories. So she goes on a journey to recover those stories, but instead she gets new ones.
Remember Remember will be staged on October 11 and 12 at 7.30 p.m. at Ranga Shankara. Call: 9901464996.
