BY SUSHMITA
After a slightly damp start, Women Centre Stage was a tight, well-executed, bold, often insightful production by Crea-Shakthi, directed by Abhinav Suresh and Vaidhya Sundar. Women Centre Stage is a series of loosely intertwined monologues by six women, all written by Gautam Raja.
The first monologue by Shilpa Iyer, who played a former beauty pageant winner was a bit of a let-down. It probably wasn’t the best piece to start the evening with, it’s hard to appreciate something quite as dramatic as that if you’re not eased into it. Tanvi Patel as Sita, the daughter of Hurricane Shobha was hilarious and really set the tone for the rest of the evening. Tehzeeb Katari’s piece as Shobha was nuanced and classy, but didn’t quite add up with Sita’s description of her.
Vishaka George’s piece as a new bride to a strange man in a strange house was an interesting, intelligent take on a story we’ve often heard before. Sunanda Raghunathan’s Ten Tonne Tongue was strangely engaging and well-written. It was an account of a faintly bored young woman out on a series of mildly pleasant dinner dates that ended in a manner that wasn’t quite to her liking. She was absolutely brilliant in the final monologue as the recently-returned-to-Chennai graduate of an American film school, describing her dream first scene.
The fact that the play was staged in the Alliance Francaise worked to its advantage as well. It is a far more intimate space than the Museum Theatre or the Music Academy and lends itself nicely to confessional theatre. Set in a highly familiar urban context, the characters, language and situations were easy to relate to. Another remarkable thing was that the monologues managed to avoid the overused pattern of a character speaking cheerily of something, until she hits upon something terribly tragic and then telling us how she bravely reconciles herself to it. The pieces in Women Centre Stage were a lot more toned-down, funny, yet insightful and refreshingly non-preachy.
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