When the clock strikes 11, most women in a Mumbai local tense up. It’s that time of the night when a ladies’ compartment turns into a general one, permitting men to enter. The women combat this by putting on their best ‘don’t mess with me’ posture.
Some would say they’ve brought on a tougher persona to intimidate any man who thinks of misbehaving. This seamless switch between demeanours, from the feminine to the masculine is an everyday phenomenon.
Theatre actors and directors Puja Sarup and Sheena Khalid, founders of the company Patchwork Ensemble, explore this duality of gender within an individual with their play Ila . First staged in 2014, the five-actor play returns to the city this evening.
The story
The gender cycle, akin to the one a local train experiences, forms most of the introspection in Ila . The play came to life when Sarup couldn’t stop thinking of a short story in Devdutt Pattanaik’s novel The Pregnant King . The book itself is set against the backdrop of the Mahabaratha where King Yuvanashva accidentally drinks a potion intended for his wife to bear him a son.
An additional short story from Pattnaik’s book, Ila (from which the play borrows its title) features another king. This one, though, goes through a gender transformation determined by the lunar cycle: transforming from a man on a full moon night to a woman on a new moon night. It all happens because King Ila accidentally walks into a forest, during the few hours when the men are forbidden to, and chances upon Shiv and Parvati in a compromising position. He’s then cursed to live his days in transition from a man to a woman and back again.
Sarup says Khalid got excited when she shared the story with her and began doing workshops. “We didn’t know who would want to work with us,” says Sarup.
Talent spotting
With just one production under their belt, in 2014, it wasn’t unusual that people weren’t fighting with each other for a chance to work with Patchwork Ensemble. However, the duo’s workshops brought together a motley crew of people who have now become Ila ’s cast.
Actor Mukul Chaddha, who worked with Sarup in a 2006 staging of Much Ado About Nothing , grew curious about the play and eventually got attached to Ila . “[Sarup] was workshopping for this play and they were playing together and having fun before the rehearsals started,” says Chaddha. “I said I’d love to come by and I just continued; the story was fascinating.”
In the end, Patchwork Ensemble brought the mythological story to the stage with a group of five passengers (four women and one male vendor), regular travellers on the same local train. When one of them gets pregnant, sagely advice turns into the regaling of Ila ’s tale.
Devising a play
What began as a mere concept took a couple of months to form before actual rehearsals began.
“The script came last,” says Amey Mehta, a contemporary dancer who made his theatre debut with Ila in 2014. “Once we had the whole play, that’s when we had the script.” He happened to be invited to one of the workshops for Ila ; when he wasn’t asked to warm up the attendees, he wondered what he was there for. Little did he know then that it was just the start of his stage career.
But somewhere between the workshop and the script, Khalid and Sarup found their actors and depended on them to flesh out Ila ’s characters.
“It wasn’t easy,” says Sarup. “That was the actors’ job. We didn’t tell them to do this or that. They found it through improv.” Making Ila has been just as important as what happens on stage. After all, as Chaddha says, “It really is a group effort when we put this together.”
Unlike other directors, Sarup and Khalid prefer to called facilitators, as they never direct or instruct. Instead, they gently nudge, hoping they and their actors find what they’re looking for.
Mehta recalls an earlier workshop: “They would come into the room and would just throw a situation: ‘You are a tree, you are a dog. Now react.’”
All this devising and workshops have armed the play’s actors with the ability to portray a character’s difficult transition from the masculine to the feminine.
“It’s an ensemble cast and different people play Ila to depict the male and female aspects,” says Prerna Chawla, another member of the cast. “It’s pretty tumultuous: you’re juggling personalities, children, families and it’s very complicated.” Chawla plays one of Ila’s wives and one of the storytellers.
Chaddha has the opportunity to play a slightly pregnant Ila and an even entirely masculine one. Mehta gets to be Budha, Ila’s “stud and masculine” husband, when she’s a woman. “He falls in love with her most feminine form,” says Mehta. “But when his wife can’t accept his male dominance [as the lunar cycle makes Ila masculine], his ego can’t take it.”
At one point in the play, the actors have to deal with a female Ila pining for her husband and male one yearning for his wives.
Ila’s never really present in the moment. It’s perhaps the most difficult part of the play: conveying Ila’s varying masculinity and femininity; the discomfort of not fitting in to the skin you’re in. And those who play Ila’s partner in turn have to showcase their frustration and dissatisfaction at being with someone who wants to be elsewhere.
Questioning gender
In the end, Patchwork Ensemble’s Ila takes a holistic look at gender without being angsty about it.
What happens when you don’t belong anywhere? Or worse, if you are both male and female?
In performing Ila’s gender transition in a matter-of-fact and tongue-in-cheek way, the actors challenge the audience’s perception of gender and how they are affected by it. Ila tries to quash the belief that gender is a social construct.
There’s one montage, when both female and male versions of Ila are onstage and a chorus of people throws instructions at them. “Walk this way, look like that,” they say.
It’s a reflection of the direct and insinuated expectations we have from people. But more importantly, the play tries to tell us, that perhaps we should stop doing just that.
Ilatoday and tomorrow at 9 p.m., Prithvi Theatre. Tickets: bookmyshow.com
Directors Puja Sarup and Sheena Khalid explore the duality of gender in a person with their play Ila
