Skeleton that won’t leave a fisherman alone

Dev D's Chanda, Kalki Koechlin, is about to stage a mytho-play in town. We get you a glimpse of The Skeleton Woman, as it's called

Dev D's Chanda, Kalki Koechlin, is about to stage a mytho-play in town. We get you a glimpse of The Skeleton Woman, as it's called

Dev D actress Kalki Koechlin turns playwright with a new play, The Skeleton Woman, that she's co-written with actor Prashant Prakash. She tells What's On why it took more than winning the Metroplus Award to convince her filmmaker boyfriend Anurag Kashyap to produce it.

Second innings

The first time Kalki Koechlin (seen as Chanda in Anurag Kashyap's Dev D) and Prashant Prakash auditioned for their play The Skeleton Woman, they did not make the mark. The audition was for Thespo, India's platform for youth theatre, and their work wasn't ready to be staged yet. Kalki was in the throes of dengue, the script was unfinished and both, Prakash and Kalki didn't find themselves in a position to take their project to an audience. Months of re-writing, fine-tuning, and finding themselves a director (documentary filmmaker Nayantara Kotian) later, The Skeleton Woman wowed the Thespo jury, and is being staged at the festival's monthly showcase of youth theatre. Excerpts from a chat with the two leads.
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How did the two of you come together to script the play?
Kalki: I came across an Inuit mythological tale in a book I was readingu00a0Women Who Run with the Wolf. The story dealt with the emotions of a woman, and so strongly that I was gripped. Incidentally, Prashant and I took a workshop with Anamika Haskar a few days later, where we were asked to work with a few scripts she handed out to us. Strangely, I was given the same storyu00a0the myth of the skeleton woman, and I began rewriting it at the workshop. Haskar read my work and told me not to give it up. Six months later, I started writing the scenes, and sent the script to Prashant for feedback.
Prashant: Even we worked on this for the longest time; we never sat in the same room. Kalki would work on it and send the script over to me. I'd add some more to it, make changes and send it back for her to review. Slowly, the work evolved into an hour-long play and then we came together to finish the script.

How did you balance writing and acting?
Kalki: It has been both, demanding and rewarding to write and act. Prashant and I are essentially actors. This was the first piece of work we were writing, but even when we wrote it, we knew that we wanted to act in it. The script has two protagonistsu00a0the woman around whom the myth has evolved, and a fisherman-turned writer who rescues her. The play swings between reality and fiction, with sharks swimming in his room and a skeleton that refuses to stop haunting him.
Prashant: There was a brief period when Kalki had decided to direct the play. But when we read it out to a group of friends, Nayantara grew interested in the script. She believed Kalki must act, so we turned to Nayantara to direct it. The process was an organic one; it all fell into place, we make a great team. In fact, that's what led us to form our own theatre company, Quaff.

Did you take the script more seriously after it won the The Metroplus Playwright Award?
Prashant: No, we took the script seriously from day one. The award was a pleasant surprise. If anything, it has made me take writing a whole lot more seriously.
Kalki: We can bounce ideas off each other, agree, disagree, fight and still come to a meeting point.

Was it easy to put up the play from scratch?
Prashant: Despite the production being taken care of, we have done a lot of running around, buying odds and ends and deciding every small detail. We have put together everything from the sets to the design for posters, on our own.

The Skeleton Woman

When: April 11 and 12

At: 8 pm

Where: Stein Auditorium, Habitat World, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road

Shows in Delhi are managed and promoted by The Actor Factor Theatre Society.

Call on 9971186136 for passes