Watch a play that urges actors to weave a story with physical, verbal actions

The conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent values in life and the inability to find them is what absurdism is all about. So when Vladimir and Estragon engage in a conversation while waiting for Godot in Samuel Beckett's play, they uphold every man's disillusionment in trying to find a meaning or validation in life.

But that is what Beckett intended to do - shock his viewers into an epiphany of absurdity. Now, a new multilingual theatre piece is gearing up to do almost the same - shock us into believing that any given format to literature or life is futile.

In US-based playwright, director and theatre pedagogue Jeffrey Sichel's play, A Divination Comedy of Eight Careless Muses, A Bespectacled Rabbit and A Chain-smoking Cat, there is no narrative. Instead, he let his characters, objects and a vocabulary of physical and verbal actions free to fend a narrative for themselves. He calls it the arbitrary system, a tool necessary to make way for new languages and performances.

Scenes from a rehearsal of the play

This weekend, Titas Dutta, a former actor of National School of Drama Repertory Company and a student of London International School of Performing Arts who is also directing the play, will try to make sense of it all. "I call the play Kal Ke Ird Gird because I like it better. The biggest challenge has been to restrict the urge of doing a lot and be simple. Before directing this play, I worked with Jeffrey in two other plays where we adapted classics by Eugene Ionesco and Anton Chekhov, but there we already had a strong multidimensional narrative. Here, we just have the arbitrary system and it is impossible to predict what will happen in each scene before it is moved in space," she says.

Titas Dutta

To prepare themselves for the show, Dutta and the actors did a 10-day-long workshop at The Theatre Company residency in Kamshet where they invoked the physical memories of collective subconscious, history and mythology. "I always prefer to work with basic elements of performance - bodies in a space over a definite duration, and specifically dig into personal physical history," she signs off.

On March 31, 6.30 pm and 9 pm
At Sitara Studio, Garage Gali, Kakasaheb Gadgil Marg (near Congress Bhavan), Lower Parel.
Log on to bookmyshow.com
Cost Rs 150

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