the grapevine is abuzz about Sunil Shanbag’s upcoming play Club Desire. So when we hear that it premiers on October 24 at NCPA, we decide to take a sneak peek. The eighth floor of the Sardar Patel Institute of Technology at Bhavan’s campus in Andheri is normally buzzing with Shanbag’s actors rehearsing in one room, while on either side, there’s Quasar Thakore Padamsee rehearsing for one of his plays and a Gujarati stage rehearsal in the other. Manasi Parekh Gohil, the protagonist of Club Desire, laughingly tells us, “I was telling Sunil the other day that if a random person happens to come to the eighth floor of this building, he will think everyone’s gone mad, with somebody yelling in one room, two people romancing in the other and someone crying in the third!”

Faisal Rashid and Manasi Parikh Gohil confront each other