The new play from the Akvarious stable is called One Night Only , but it has little to do with the urban peccadilloes the prolific production house usually preoccupies itself with. Instead, it refers to a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon that takes place in the village of Koovagam in Tamil Nadu annually. For about a fortnight each year in the Tamil month of Chaitra, thousands of transgender individuals congregate at the Koothandavar Temple dedicated to Aravan, the son of Arjuna who became their community deity. This festival has become the sleepy hamlet’s calling card, transforming it into a site of cleansing and catharsis for the kinnar community, and provides the tantalising backdrop for the Akvarious production in which Aravan’s tale is to be recounted by a lively ensemble. The play marks the directorial debut of choreographer-actor Amey Mehta, who helms a script he has co-written with Tahira Nath Krishnan.
Contemporary interpretations
“I was looking for a story rich in mythology, in which I could use elements from traditional forms,” says Mehta, who has acted in The Patchworks Ensemble’s Ila , that also took off from a gender-queer episode in the Mahabharata. The origins of the festival are linked to one of the epic’s ancillary narratives —Aravan’s wedding with Mohini (Krishna’s female form) before his self-sacrificial death at the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The play was forged on the creative struggle of whether to give the Itihāsa prominence, or foreground its contemporary cultural expression. Mehta hopes the play achieves a happy balance.
While he couldn’t take his actors to Koovagam itself, as part of the rehearsal process Mehta organised a day-long mock-event at the Cuckoo Club in Bandra. His mixed-gender ensemble of roughly a dozen players assumed fetching transgender guises and took part in actual rituals like getting married with ceremonial fanfare to Aravan, and then mourning his pre-ordained death with an unbearable sorrow that was hardly feigned. They also prepared performances for a talent contest, just like the many that are organised in real life.
Mehta roped in the likes of Puja Sarup, Prerna Chawla and Kashin Shetty to visit the space as celebrity judges who were flamboyantly transgender themselves. “I didn’t want the transgenders [folk] to provide just an exotic backdrop to a tale about warriors,” explains Mehta, who wants his play to celebrate the community’s vivacity and spirit despite the great odds stacked against them in society.
Casting woes
Given the stereotypical representation of trangenders in our cultural space, Mehta liaised with real-life transgenders, and even had one, Madhuri, on board as a consultant. “Interestingly, it was the women in the cast who found it difficult to put on an exaggerated femininity at first,” he recalls. They were put out of their misery when Madhuri spoke of the paradox of being rejected from transgender roles despite her clear bona fides, because she was “uber-feminine”. Of course, the ensemble also take on other characters, including great combatants, and Mehta ensured they were trained in forms like Kalaripayattu and Karagattam.
Internationally, a new movement increasingly gaining currency advocates for the casting of transgender actors in transgender parts — resulted in Scarlett Johansson withdrawing from a film after receiving backlash for her casting as a transman. This hasn’t reached Indian shores, although Faezeh Jalali, who made Shikhandi-The Story of the In-Betweens , and Mehta have extensively auditioned transgender actors. Mehta cites many reasons for his entirely cisgender ensemble. “Giving up their livelihood for three months to work in a theatre project was a tough ask for some of them,” he says.
Many didn’t even identify with the Koovagam context that was so rife with possibilities for Mehta and his team. He says quite unequivocally, “My target audience is not the transgender community only. I want all people who watch the play to feel and know the community better. If that leads to greater acceptance, my work is done.”
One Night Only will be staged this evening at 9 p.m. to Sunday August 5 at Prithvi Theatre, Juhu; see bookmyshow.com for details
