The Actor’s Craft India will stage their first production of one-act plays strung together by a common fun and freeing theme
(From left) Raghav Aggarwal, Ullas Samrat, Siddhant Gupta, and Abhishek Athalye
A bride locked up in a bathroom. Two guards imagining a monument under construction. A husband and wife locked in an eternal battle. A lineup of imaginative performances may be just the thing to kickstart your April. If the craft of acting fascinates you, this might be the performance you have been waiting for.
Directed by Raghav Aggarwal, founder-director, The Actor’s Craft India, the group will start off its first production of Vodka Shorts at The Veda Factory – Art Studio. A compendium of five-one act plays, the production was born out of the need for actors to return to the stage.
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The long-forced furlough of the pandemic had left actors itching for a return to the hallowed grounds. “I am myself stepping on the stage after three and a half years,” Aggarwal tells us. The director will take to stage to perform a portion from Renee Taylor’s hit Broadway play, Lovers and Other Strangers.
Raghav Aggarwal
Why pick these plays, we ask, and he replies instantaneously: “Life should be thrilling.” Aggarwal quips, “It is a lot about permission, what we can and cannot do in life, and where our imagination can take us.” Understandably, since Aggarwal and his team are practitioners of the Meisner technique, this performance might just be the right proof of their evolution as actors. For the audience, this simply means an explosive combination of realism and emotional expression.
Comedy seems to be a theme running through the production. The performances begin with the third act of Neil Simon’s comedy, The Plaza Suite, to wrap up with the final act from Chandrasekhar Phansalkar’s uplifting piece.
The answer, the director says, is in the fifth piece. The act from Phansalkar’s Tax Free revolves around a blind man joining an exclusive club for the blind. “Society has a conventional perception of what blind people can or cannot do. It is about how these people break that permission, and then, have all sorts of fun,” he shares.
Fun is something audiences desperately need to start their month on the right note. With the venue set at the heart of Mumbai’s performing arts hub, it might be the right place to pick up some skills as well as a life lesson or two.
On: Today, 8 pm; April 2, 10 pm
At: Veda Factory – Art Studio, Aram Nagar, Versova, Andheri West
Cost: Rs 300 onwards
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