Grey Anatomy

Two strangers. An airport. A delayed flight. Yes,they get chatting — but that’s where the cliché ends in the play,Thus Spake Shoorpanakha,So Said Shakuni. It’s not the weather,IPL or politics that fill their conversation,but characters from the great Indian epics. As the conversation progresses,the two travellers find themselves undergoing a change,getting transformed into two of the greatest villains of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,Shoorpanakha and Shakuni respectively . “They get into the biographies of these grey characters and,in the process,question how much we really know these villains. The actors change on stage to enact various stages in the lives of Shoorpanakha and Shakuni,” says lead actor Oroon Das.

In a play dotted with monologues,Shoorpanakha wonders if Rama was justified in chopping off her nose because she was attracted to him. Shakuni,on his part,recounts how he had been imprisoned by the Kuru rulers and stayed alive only because his brothers would feed him their ration. Thus Spake Shoorpanakha,So Said Shakuni — based on Poile Sengupta’s post-modern text — that turns the spotlight on two marginalised characters from Indian mythology,is presented as much as theatre as a performance art. Present on stage with the actors,sound wiz Abhijit Tambe creates live music mixes as the play progresses.

The choice of the play as well as its edgy treatment is in keeping with the troupe BooGio11 Productions’ motto of “creating value rather than presenting populist works”. “The epics were written by men and their translations,too,were mostly by men. I was excited to find this text written by a woman because the stories that we have inherited shape our values even today,” says Divya Chandra,who plays the female protagonist.

Thus Spake Shoorpanakha,So Said Shakuni will be staged at Islamic Cultural Center on May 4-6