Gurgaon’s local theatre scene now has original writing by groups like Urban Suburban. Director Vanessa Ohri chatted with Shana M Verghis after a Sunday supper show
DlF 5 City Club, Phase V in Gurgaon fancies itself the next hub for the local cultural scene in Delhi. It is located close to the Golf Course, with lots of condominium’s looming over. And on a Sunday, the residents who also happen to be members want to let down their hair.
This past weekend, the club was the venue for a supper-theatre production featuring four short playlets by a group from here called Urban Suburban.
Vanessa Ohri, one of the main members, explained this company is made of people from eclectic professions. “CEOs, students, housewives.” You don’t have to have a background or experience in theatre to join them.
And from the quality of acting, we have to say, that most of the performers were naturals. Or they got some really good directors in the shape of Vanessa and fellow scriptwriter-director Farha Singh.
The show called Fly High Firefly, was an abbreviated version of something that they did on Women’s Day this year at the Epicentre. They have been doing productions on that day for four years. One of the short pieces called Bus Stop! was a “hard-hitting piece about rape.” But because people watching supper theatre won’t be in the mood to be belaboured about social issues, they cut it out.
The other four, which were also written by Ohri-Singh, were all women centric. However one of the USP’s was that they weren’t adaptations of foreign plays, so the flavour was local, and went down very well with the audience.
The second thing was that they were not’ about sad sack women who were either sloganeering about something, or crying buckets, for other reasons.
In short they weren’t predictable. Although one refrain was men having affairs with other women and women having their own back, by having their bit on the side. Although to the detriment of both the parties. They were introduced after a music video rephrasing Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire. Instead of which we got a list of famous women like Cleopatra, Aishwarya Rai etc. Westerners far outnumbered Bharatiya naris.
The video was a nice touch, featuring the cast as well. Then opened onto a scene of Fallen Angel, in a Mumbai flat, where a Goan, Mrs De Costa was mourning the loss of her husband Dickie, who passed away skyjumping in Thailand. A second Mrs De Costa appeared on the scene, and it turned out Dickie had been quite the player, leaving three progeny, through bigamy. The women gradually bonded while bitching about him. And as they made piece, a third Mrs De Costa walked in!
The second piece was a second part of Maid for Each Other, in which a Punjabi housewife and her Bengali maid — both with annoying partners, become wedding planners. The accents in both this and the first play were very precise.
They there wa lV*NV, featuring three women waiting in Terminal 1 of Delhi airport. Their bags and brand consciousness announcing aspirations to be “the elite,” and “fashionable”, leads to a catfight. Then they begin to relate! The fourth piece, I’m Every Woman, was about how, “women are women’s worst enemies, usually working against each other.”
It had several soliloquies connecting various people. First a working mum in Gurgaon was having an affair with a much younger gym instructor. His wife, a parlour attendant pronounces doom on the first woman.
There is a third lady, whose only goal is to get her very intelligent daughter married to a mummy’s boy. And there’s a model who turns out to be the first woman’s daughter. She was just dumped by her date, mummy’s boy. Urban Suburban also features men, though not this time. And they generally do play readings.
They have had productions of foreign place and shows for kids. Now they are keen to develop more local material, “because people relates to the situations and characters better.” And why notIJ In addition they also do Murder Over Dinner improvs. Apparently most of the cast were originally part of something called “the Aravalli Centre for Arts and Culture.”