Making an audience laugh can be either very easy or very difficult. Difficult, when it comes to intelligent humour and easy when it comes to slap-stick or bawdy humour. “Orgasm”, the play, staged recently at Alliance Francaise, falls in the latter category. Yes, you'll find yourself laughing at the dirty jokes and the embarrassing moments between two gawky teenagers and a newly married couple. But that's it. The laughter fades away. In fact, once the play is over and you leave the auditorium all you remember is that you laughed during the play, but what about? The answer eludes you.
The play, however, scores in some parts. For one, it is an original script. The plots and scenes are fairly structured, but nuances that add to a play are completely absent. Joel and Samantha look back on their seven-year long courtship and twenty-year long marriage. The play opens with two nervous teenagers about to make love for the first time. Excitement, teasing, fights and a failed attempt at a striptease makes the scene energetic and entertaining. The play alternates between Joel's and Samantha's past and present. Joel's and Sam's relationship has its share of joy and difficulties, but they tide over them bravely.
The point of the play is that love triumphs over all odds and sex isn't everything. After all the loud roars of laughter, the forced sentimentalism imposed on the audience was awfully fake.
Technically, there were many high points in the play. Stage management was good, the props were minimal, yet effective and the lights heightened emotions in the play. The performances were consistent and sincere. Apoorva Tadepalli and Leston Rayner's performances as the younger Joe and Sam were particularly endearing. Ruchi Raveendran, Avinash Daniel, Rency Philip and Karan Kumar played their parts well enough as the middle-aged and elderly Joe and Sam. The thrill of “Orgasm”, though, lasted only momentarily.
