The knotty PLOT

Pillai, who’s been with Primetime since the decade-old Dance Like A Man, says, “Unlike the off-stage familiarity in our previous plays, I had to establish fresh equations with the new actors this time.” One of them being Paul, who, in fact, decided to return after watching Dubey’s last play Kanyadaan. “Joy Sengupta’s performance in Kanyadaan was the trigger. Never had an actor’s performance awed me so much. The moment it was over, I asked Dubey to cast me in her next,” says Paul.

Dubey interrupts our chat with a shout for another take. A stickler for time, she tells this correspondent, “You are the first person to see a complete rehearsal of my play before its launch.” Sharing this honour is Dubey’s husband Ravi who is also present on the sets.
Dubey, who is an actor herself, prefers not to act in the plays she directs, including Wedding Album. “I step in only when I don’t find the right actor or if the right choice isn’t free. Even in Dance Like A Man, I stepped in just a month before it went on stage,” she says.

Wedding Album is a landmark for Dubey. It is the first play written by theatre legend Girish Kanrad that she’s directing. But while Karnad’s pieces are mammoth historicals, Dubey’s signature is predominantly simple, contemporary family stories. “We’ve been talking of collaborating for a long time. He had even suggested that I should direct his play on Tipu Sultan. But it had a huge cast and the logistics are a nightmare if you travel with your plays,” she says.
But his Wedding Album, exploring how “weddings did more to divide families than unite them,” hooked Dubey. “I wanted it to be my next after Sammy, but since it wasn’t ready, I did Kanyadaan instead, last year. Though it’s sharply observant and intelligently conveyed like any Karnad play, its setting is contemporary India,” she says.

The play, about a wedding in a middle-class Brahmin family of Dharwad, comes with contemporary ingredients—Internet sex chats, pop spiritualism, adolescent crushes, arranged marriages with NRI grooms and the making of current television soaps.
Kulkarni, who had acted in the Marathi edition of Karnad’s cult play Naaga Mandala in the Nineties, says, “Lillete has done a good job of bringing to the fore the difficult layers in Karnad’s writing. Though I have played a hassled mother before, I have three volatile outbursts in this play, none of which is identical.”
Gujarati theatre veteran Utkarsh Mazumdar, who plays Kulkarni’s husband in the play, echoes, “It’s a rich play that unfolds like a collage of pictures, each telling a story of its own.”  

Dubey’s daughter Ira, who is the production’s assistant director and plays the lead woman protagonist, Mridula, says, “A good play’s hallmark is that after it ends, the audience still wants more. Nothing in Wedding Album is black or white. Each character has ambiguities and some tracks are unresolved.”
As Ira coordinates actor dates and gleans Dubey’s tips scribbled on a sheet with diligent professionalism, her mother’s shout—“Action”—instantly transforms her into a small-town girl with pre-marital anxieties. “It’s difficult to juggle, but the ‘warm-up’— a backstage ritual in which actors form a circle and pray minutes before the curtain rises—takes away my headaches related to production such as lights, sounds and other nitty-gritties,” she says.

A day after the premiere, we ask Dubey about the response to Wedding Album. “It was a packed theatre. The audience was crackling with laughter that had Girish, who flew in for the premiere from Bangalore, return with ample glee,” she says.
Dubey is now gearing for a countrywide showcase with her team in Chennai, Delhi, Chandigarh, Bangalore and Hyderabad till July. Quiz her on what after Wedding Album and she says, “Maybe a musical or a period play. I am a restless director. I can’t stick to one genre, but which ever it is, the focus will always be on relationships.”