There is an idea that sits beneath The Pomegranate Collective’s latest production, How Does Your Garden Grow? The play does not tell one story about one question. Instead, eight interconnected stories and characters keep returning to a larger pursuit, allowing each conversation to take the inquiry somewhere new.
The question of why people have children and why they want to have children is one of the places that inquiry begins, but it does not end there. Questions of choice sit at its heart too: What prompts us to make a choice? Do we really want what we choose?
“With each story, the inquiry is progressing. The inquiry about purpose,” says Pallavi Verma, who directs the production.
The Pomegranate Collective brings together six members who wanted to approach theatre as a shared creative exercise. The name itself comes from the image of many individual parts coming together to form one whole. The approach, Verma says, allows ownership and responsibility to be shared rather than resting on one person.
Verma had earlier been making plays through Kriti Stories, but the pressure of putting up productions often pulled her away from the creative side. “I wanted to focus more on the creative side of things,” she says. “When everything rests on one person, especially when it is an event, the risk factor is very high.”
All the actors in How does your garden grow? are experienced theatre practitioners who have come together for this particular production.
The play emerged through a process of devising, with the team gradually developing an original work through conversations and ideas. As they worked together, they found that people from different backgrounds were talking about concerns and experiences that felt similar in their own lives. Those conversations eventually became the starting point for the play.
What emerged is The Pomegranate Collective’s first full-length original play, written by Verma along with Madhuri Dempsey, Shikha Gupta and R K Shenoy. The eight stories unfold in what the collective describes as a “rhizomatic structure”. Each scene brings together two actors, with one character moving into the next scene and encountering another, allowing the stories to branch out while remaining connected.
This version has changed considerably from its earlier staging. Three storylines were dropped, while the remaining eight were reworked to give each story a more equal presence. One of the hardest stories to write, Verma says, was that of a couple trying to reconcile after a period of unexplained disconnection.
The set and physical transitions are also part of the storytelling. Since the play employs conversations as its form, the characters never change their chairs. The physical device of the play, therefore, explores the chair as each character’s ego.
Performed in English and Hindi, the production runs for almost two hours with a short break. After its first performance on October 2, it returns on October 10 at Rangbhoomi.
“Everyone will find a personal connect with at least one of the characters,” Verma hopes.