The dark world of human trafficking and sexual slavery was brought to the fore with a thought-provoking performance by the young theatre group called Faces on Sunday evening at Beach Road. The hard-hitting 20-minutes play was a powerful message to highlight the issue and how the den of prostitution traps women into an unending vicious circle. The play was inspired by the documentary ‘Gudia' which tells the story of a young woman sold into prostitution and how the hypocrisy of the society -- right from her own family to the medical fraternity -- shut all the doors of hope to restart her life afresh. The beating of drums and collective chorus of over 20 performers stirred up the crowd and fuelled up emotions as a large crowd gathered around to watch the play. In an interaction with The Hindu after the play, the actors said how they were ready to take on the broader issue of human trafficking through this play.
“Working on the street play was an overwhelming feeling for us. Our aim is not just to speak about the issue. We wanted the audio-visual effect and story-telling technique to be powerful enough to speak for an issue which would stay in the minds of the audience for a long time,” said Vivek Ranjan, president of Faces, The Theatre Club and a third year B.Tech student of GITAM University. It took the team nearly three months of planning to create the storyline and work on it in their endeavour to make it an effective social message. “We did a lot of research for the play. We saw documentaries, gathered data and also read the real-life stories of victims," said G. Yogesh, a second year B.Tech student of the university who wrote the storyline.
For the first time, a theatre group from Visakhapatnam performed for Manthan Mahotsav, the largest street theatre festival of the country. The brainchild of Verve - the street play society of Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies, Delhi University - Manthan 2017 created history with street plays being performed across cities in India, simultaneously.
In 2017, the street theatre festival is featuring about 125 teams performing street plays about relevant social topics at roads, schools, markets, NGOs, slums, villages and monuments.
