One Night Stand

On a balmy Thursday evening,a quintet of ladies introduced the word vagina to a “dirty-minded audience” at the Akshara theatre,where a packed audience,laughed with vicarious pleasure at the performance directed by Mahabanoo Mody Kotwal and Kaizaad Kotwal. The hilarious one-night performance played out vignettes on the V-word,based on interviews done by American playwright,feminist and activist Eve Ensler,author of the now famous Vagina Monologues. The performance was organised by Breakthrough,a human rights organisation celebrating its tenth anniversary.

But it wasn’t just the V word doing the round,the clitorial truth was revealed over much laughter as Kotwal said,“The clitoris is the one body part which has been dismissed,unexplored and misunderstood for hundreds of years”.

Some of the most memorable monologues included the Flood by Kotwal,who played an ageing Parsi lady who recalls an embarrassing moment in her youth when she shocked her date,a “good catch,” with her ardour. In the monologue titled Because he likes to look at it,Sonali Sachdev plays a

Maharashtrian woman who discovers the pleasure of voyeurism. However,the light-hearted drama’s mainstay is the feisty Jayati Bhatia,who is loud,and appropriately hilarious.