Everyday stories are sometimes the trickiest ones to tell. They don’t have neat beginnings and ends, with carefully planned and sustained plots. They meander, ravelling and unravelling, and are difficult to pin down. Black Boxers Productions and Actors’ Cult’s play, “A Kind of True Story”, written by Balaji Gauri and directed by Kalyani Hiwale, performed for the 16th Bharat Rang Mahotsav in New Delhi, celebrates these stories, and becomes, like them, difficult to pin down. Eight lives, loosely linked, lived out in a Mumbai residential area, face emotional and physical upheaval, when a redevelopment project threatens to destroy their homes and memories. A writer watches, writing their stories as well as living them.
Excerpts from an interview with the director:
One could say that this play was about redevelopment and the issues that come with it, but that’s only partly true. It’s a mixed bag of emotions and reactions. Which makes me wonder if there was a central, single intent behind the play?
I think what we are trying to say is that everyone has a story to tell, it might not be a success story and he or she might not lead the life of a celebrity, but every life is a celebration. We take what experiences come our way. Life doles out experiences we might not be able to handle, but that’s how it is.
It’s a mixed cast you’ve put together in the play, and each role and backstory seems carefully chosen. Was that so?
When I had first thought of this play, I had very few characters to begin with. Anand had been in my mind for a long time. Then there was Parth, who is an actor. My husband is also an actor so I live with someone who goes though the frustrations connected with this career. Then we had Sameer and Sumedha. Initially, we started off with these characters and the rest evolved through time. In the beginning, we knew nothing more that these four characters and the fact that they were from Mumbai. As we built in more characters and changed them, we realised that we needed something to bring them all together, the common thread. Then the redevelopment came in, because that’s also something we live with and are familiar with in Mumbai.
And this very thing about Sameer, the fact that he’s writing the stories of these characters, as well as existing within his own story, creates a sort of half reality about the play that is never explained entirely.
Since Sameer was a writer and character, we took the liberty of playing with time and not really defining it or placing the play in standard linear time. We go back into the past and then switch back and forth. Fact is when we conceived Sameer, it gave us a chance to play with real and abstract spaces. That’s how things shaped up. We did a lot of intensive work with the actors. We worked on this play for four and half months.
Right from the beginning, the play breaks the fourth wall, connecting directly with the audience. This repeats through the story. Your comments on the use of this device?
Sameer was our only connect with audience. He would be our link, the one person who had to explain what was happening, which was necessary because we were doing a lot of crazy things like playing with time and space. He’s writing a story, and he was also the voice of what each character stood for.
The songs were striking, and frequent. It’s not a musical, but music plays a very important narrative role.
I always knew that I wanted music in my play. These characters were so real, they had to have music. Through music you can convey so much. The songs were written especially for the play. Most of them by Gauri. Vinayak’s composition brought the right flavour to these songs. I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for. I knew it wouldn’t be like a Broadway musical because these characters were too earthy and real. Vinayak did justice to the songs and made sure they fit the play’s tone.
