YPS Mohali will stage Ayn Rands Night of January 16th for its annual production The day of reckoning is around the corner,hurried rehearsals and moments of anxiety affecting the director and cast who will stage Ayn Rands Night of January 16th,the annual production of the senior school of YPS Mohali. The play,inspired by the death of Ivar Kreuger,takes place in a court room and revolves around a murder trial. An interesting feature of the play is that members of the audience are picked and asked to take on the role of jury members, says the schools theatre instructor Zubin Mehta,who is directing the play. The play thus remains open-ended,its conclusion determined by the fact as to whether the audience-jury finds the fictional defendant guilty. Further,the audience is kept on tenterhooks because what really happens on January 16 is never revealed,and the performers have to decide how much of their characters testimony is true. The play needed to be edited as its theme and some of the dialogues are suitable only for adults, says Mehta. The students were able to get into the skin of the characters and understood the plot perfectly, he adds. Staging a classic has its own challenges because you have to do justice to the original, says Mehta,who staged Agatha Christies Mousetrap and Saadat Hassan Mantos Toba Tek Singh for the two previous productions. For Night of January 16th,Mehta has been working with a cast of 22 students for the last two months. Having worked with many of them over the last seven years,he has seen them mature under his tutelage. Unlike other plays,where there is a lot of on-stage movement and drama,we had to resort to expression and dialogues to hold the attention of the audience,so that the treatment does not seem juvenile, points out Amarinder,a Class XII student,who is playing the lead role and enjoys being on the stage. The students have also composed the background score of the play. According to Ranbeer,who passed out of the school two years ago and has composed the tracks along with Rana Gurtej,the music is instrumental and in sync with the theme of the play. Watch the play on April 30 at 6.45 pm at Tagore Theatre. Children below 12 are not allowed.
