One of the enduring images from the NCPA’s recent Centrestage Festival, is that of a pensive woman (Rama Joshi), quietly sitting at one end of the stage, as the audience files in for Absolute , the lone Marathi play at the festival, directed by Mandar Deshpande. During the overture, Joshi picks up a flute to mime a riff; a simple gesture that gives her character an agency that is rare and elegant. In the sparse village setting that marks one third of the stage, we see more of her interior world, even though her life is entwined with that of an apathetic husband. Playwright Yugandhar Deshpande contrasts her quietude, and compliance to her wifely duties, with the jarring superficialities that mark the existence of her son’s wife (Gauri Nalawade), a selfie-obsessed manqué whose independent streak and newfangled sensibilities are so alienating. Although afforded much more space in the narrative, Nalawade’s character ultimately becomes a brittle cipher for an vacant and interminable ennui: supposedly modern living in the digital age. Even an intense dance set-piece brings us no closer to her fragmented psyche. There is nothing inside, unlike the worlds held so preciously within Joshi, the woman with the flute.
Absolute is a play that doesn’t adequately resolve its dichotomies, but it does share parallels with other Centrestage plays that juxtapose the lives of women living in disparate worlds. For instance, Sushmita Mukherjee’s Naribai , dealing with a writer’s encounter with a Bedhni woman in Bundelkhand (both played by Mukherjee); and Divya Jagdale’s Facials, Pedicures and Mind Masala , on the friendship between a cloistered housewife (Jagdale) and a single woman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) who is footloose and fancy-free.
The latter is a play marred with tonal inconsistencies, and wears its agenda of victim-hood on its sleeve, but Chatterjee, returning to the stage after a long hiatus, manages to leap-frog over the triteness and offers up a woman of the world, confident and unapologetic, narcissistic yet compassionate. In one scene, she manages to persuade Jagdale’s homemaker to shed her inhibitions, as they both wear fetching swimsuits to a beach, a hilarious sequence that comes off as liberating on the staid Indian stage. In contrast to Absolute , Chatterjee’s modern woman isn’t judged or castigated, and certainly doesn’t have to pay for her foibles. She is let alone. It is the repressed woman who must bare the brunt of being complicit in her own despondency.
Naribai , in turn, benefits from Mukherjee’s power of articulation even in a piece that boasts of very little stagecraft, both in terms of mise en scène or narrative design. The eponymous character is a tribal performer of the Rai folk form, which has links to the flesh trade. Yet she forges a powerful destiny for herself despite all odds. Mukherjee brings a quality of verbatim theatre to her spiel, getting the details of culture and accent right, and Naribai is a compelling character for the ages. Yet, it is Mukherjee’s depiction of the upper-class woman, Sunaina, who engages with Naribai to write a book on her life, that is surprisingly much more nuanced and immediate, her repression being so much more insidious despite her privilege and her agency. Naribai herself comes across as much more emancipated, and entirely because of her gumption for life. Unlike the soul-sisters of Facials, Pedicures and Mind Masala , the two women engage in a purely transactional relationship, yet the interchange pulls the rug from beneath Sunaina’s feet. She must reinvent herself to hold on to her own sanity. Thematically strong and robust, Naribai is a scattered experience that needs a streamlining of purpose.
Perhaps the most satisfyingly realised piece at the festival was Gurleen Judge’s enchanting Dohri Zindagi , based on a story by masterful Rajasthani storyteller Vijaydan Detha, whose deep empathy for the female condition has resulted in a rich canon that is only slowly being unearthed. While displaying ample fidelity to Detha’s narrative thrust, the play’s devised grammar is much more amorphous, with piquant folk and contemporary elements informing the inspired work by its actors.
Bhumika Dube and Neha Singh enact two women betrothed to one another while still in the womb; one of them raised as a man to fulfill her father’s folly. Their discovery of each other’s burgeoning desires and undeniable femininity on the night of enforced nuptials, leads them to attempt carving out an alternative existence in a surreal hideout guarded over by a friendly ghost. The juxtaposition here is of the binaries of gender embodied by the women, rather than the nuances of transgendered subtext unlike, say, Anup Singh’s contemporary classic, Qissa , which shares common ground with the tale.
Here, Singh’s character is liberated from her conditioned masculinity to rejoice in a womanhood hitherto denied to her. Yet sexual desire, which the play doesn’t pussyfoot around, is shown as fluid and incandescent, and alive to the touch. The actors cannot completely shake off their own liberated selves, and the pain of oppression is never really a part of the play’s tarmac, yet the women in it soar with a felicity and ease that is refreshing and ultimately transgressive.
Over the last few editions, plays at the Centrestage have been invariably inchoate, some pregnant with possibilities, others still-born. Yet there is no denying that new works need precisely this kind of institutional support to be engendered and then sent on their way, to destinies all of their own.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
