Eight stories, one inquiry: Inside The Pomegranate Collective’s latest production

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 eight 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 treats theatre less as a conventional group effort and more as a shared creative exercise. A pomegranate, as Verma sees it, brings together many individual parts to form one whole. The metaphor reflects the collective’s approach to theatre, with ownership and responsibility shared rather than resting on one person.

Verma had earlier been making plays through Kriti Stories, but the pressure of putting up productions often took 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.”

That desire for shared ownership led to The Pomegranate Collective. It is not a conventional theatre group whose actors have newly come together. The eight actors in the production are experienced theatre practitioners who have come together for this particular play.

The play began with a different script. The group had worked on about 15 to 20 per cent of it before realising they could not obtain the rights from the author. The project was dropped, but the conversations stayed with Verma. She noticed that people from different backgrounds were talking about things that felt similar in their own lives. If so many people were relating to the same concerns, she wondered, perhaps there was a story worth telling.

What emerged is the 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 transitions also carry part of the narrative.

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.