“It’s an anthology, but also not an anthology. If you miss the first story, you won’t get the fifth story. If you miss the second, you won’t comprehend the fourth. Don’t come late,” warns Anantharaman Karthik, director of the soon-to-be-staged play, Somewhere Between The Sky and The Sea . Scripted by Alex Broun, the nine stories bring out different shades of love: longing, heartbreak, infatuation and sexual attraction. “It happens with everybody at a certain point of time,” he believes.
The play engages with attractions outside predictable social orbits. You have a man in love with two women, a woman in a relationship with a man but attracted to another, and a girl desperately trying to overcome the ghosts of her past relationship to welcome a new one. “A person can fall in love with two people. And, she can tell the world she is confused. The characters, at times, think aloud. It can also look like they are telling their stories to the audience. The play uses a combination of story telling and theatrical motifs.”
Says Karthik: “I wanted every character to love each other. Often, we don’t express our love for someone or something for different reasons. There is always a point of insecurity.” He chanced upon Broun’s works at the last edition of the Short + Sweet Theatre Festival in Chennai, where his play
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He has also performed it in two poetry events to positive feedback.
Out of the 20 stories that are part of Broun’s works, he selected nine because he could sense a thread of continuity in them. “They basically deal with romance; of people caught between two things. All of them are in a nowhere land, and in a state of dilemma.”