The End: Mumbai’s Parwana Theatre explores ‘different journeys of love’ in its new anthology; shows in Bengaluru this week
Directed by Nikhita Singh, the three-part play is ready for its first Bengaluru tour, with shows lined up at Jagriti Theatre and Shoonya — Centre for Art and Somatic Practices
By Reema Gowalla
Endings can be difficult, more so if it’s a relationship that you have invested in and nurtured for years. Stories about love and romantic bonds often illuminate the pages of novels, just as they turn movie plots into an engaging watch. But not so many of such stories are enacted on stage. In a bid to fill that void, three Mumbai-based women playwrights — Nikhita Singh, Mitali Kalagi and Sambita De — have put together an anthology of three short plays that are loosely based on their own lives. Parwana Theatre’s new play The End is about ‘different journeys of love’ and how they culminate. Designed and directed by Nikhita, the play is coming to Bengaluru this week, with shows scheduled at Jagriti Theatre (on November 7) and at Shoonya — Centre for Art and Somatic Practices on (November 8).
The play sheds light on the the lives of three couples who are at different stages of their lives — Lovebirds (written by Nikhita) is about two college sweethearts in their 20s; Boyfriend Material (by Mitali) traces a live-in couple in their 30s; and Too Good For You (by Sambita) follows a married couple in their 40s. While exploring the intricacies of love and romance, the narrative also dabbles in the complexities of fading relationships. It ‘depicts the joy of wide-eyed youth and discovery, the monotony of cohabitation and the practical necessities that drive loveless marriages’.
Already performed in Mumbai, Nashik, Pune and Delhi, The End promises a multisensorial experience for the audience — complete with movement, music, poetry and innovative stage design. The cast includes Rituparna Sanyal, Kaustav Sinha, Aditya Kashyap and Mitali. Babusha Jain is the play’s movement director, while the music is composed by Harsh Choudhary and the lyrics and poetry are by Madhumoy Satpathy.
Ahead of the Bengaluru shows, Nikhita spoke at length about why they felt the need to write these stories, the making of the play, and more. Excerpts from her freewheeling conversation with TheatreRoom:
Q. Three women playwrights have put together an anthology of plays about love and what it entails. How did it all begin?
A. It started with me and one of the other playwrights, Mitali, who is also a close friend of mine. We had been observing each other’s and other female friends’ lives very closely, especially the aspects of modern dating, love and relationships. Somehow, we felt that narratives around such real-life stories are rarely found on the stage. There’s some representation of it on screen, but maybe not so much in theatre. So, we decided on exploring that further, and started working on our respective scripts. In the process, I also realised that a lot of what I was writing about in my piece, which is called Love Birds, was about memory as well. Much of it was about the notions of love and relationships that we build over the course of our lives — from childhood to adulthood.
Then the third playwright, Sambita, joined the team. She used to be a student of mine at Wilson College [in Mumbai]. One day, out of nowhere, she came to me and said that she had written something and wanted me to give her some feedback on it. Coincidentally, the script she wrote was thematically the same thing as Mitali and mine. It was interesting because she had written about an older married couple’s relationship.
Q. Tell us a little more about the essence of the play…
A. All the three stories were somewhat autobiographical, drawing from our own experiences. But there was an element of memory that was very prominent in all three. We think about love and relationships in a certain way, mainly because our brains are trained to think about them in a certain manner. But what we experience in real life is quite different. So, how do you negotiate that? How do we deal with endings? What happens when you have to leave a relationship that you took years to build? Especially as cisgender women, it becomes difficult to deal with the loss, because we are brought up to believe that we have to be partnered up. We’re always told that we need to have someone in life. And it’s said not just in our familial settings, but also in peer groups. We live in a society where women are constantly being told to adjust, compromise and stay put. These are some of the factors that are addressed in the play.
Q. Compared with prior generations, many modern couples seem to opt out of incompatible relationships. Is that aspect also factored in The End? How deeper have you gone to explore it?
A. It was actually one of the looming questions that we dealt with while making the play. How deep should we go into it after all? And I can tell you we were able to find a lot of these answers in the text itself. The three stories end up being about three women at completely different stages of life. The protagonist in the first story is a young college-going girl. She’s 20 and new to the city, so she’s negotiating a lot of things. In the middle of all that, there is also a relationship to take care of. The second story is about a live-in couple. Their conflict is more to do with gendered division of labour within the household, which we think is a concern among same-sex couples too. A lot of audiences, who are in queer relationships, have found it relatable. The third story is about an older couple, who have been married for a long time. They have seen a fair bit of life as individuals and also as partners, and now they have kind of grown away from each other.
I think just looking at these characters, who are at very different junctures in their lives, allowed us to go deeper. If we probably had a linear narrative with a select set of characters, we would not have had the freedom to go so deep. But here, because we were not bound by a linear flow, we managed to incorporate that.
Q. Although it’s a new play, The End has travelled quite a bit already. What are the kind of responses you have received so far?
A. Honestly, I was quite nervous before the play premiered. I was confident about the shape that the play was taking and how we experimented with its form and structure, but there’s also a lot of movement in the piece. While I was happy that we had found a language for the play, I was deeply sceptical about how the audience would respond to the text itself. But fortunately, it went fabulously.
I think what really worked for us is the everydayness and the quotidian aspect of the context, the fact that it can happen to anybody. Additionally, there is a lot of interconnectedness in the three stories, and the audience has responded well so far. Many people look at the movement and make meaning of it with the help of the text. Meanwhile, the others are more intrigued by the stories and characters, and the movement elevates that experience for them.
Catch shows of The End at Jagriti Theatre on November 7 (7.30pm) and at Shoonya — Centre for Art and Somatic Practices for Bangalore International Centre (BIC’s) ‘Elsewhere Programme’ on November 8 (7pm and 8.30pm).
