Hindi play Selfie compels viewers to ‘smile please’

Selfies are integral to modern-day life, which is so tech-driven. Users of mobile phones need an opportunity to click selfies at a random rate, no matter what. Ideas — The Entertainment Company of Mumbai recently staged a Hindi play titled, Selfie at Kolkata’s Kala Mandir auditorium as part of the annual Sangit Kala Mandir Utsav.

Produced by Paritosh Painter and directed by Tenaz Irani, the two-hour long comedy, layered with dollops of satire and emotional undercurrents, was indeed a delight to watch.

A talented bunch of actresses in the cast namely, Shweta Gulati, Kishwar Merchant, Priya Malik, Dimple Shah and Tenaz Irani took the play to a different level, simply with their powerpacked performances.

The best part about the piece is that nobody tries to upstage the others, every performer looks the part, every role is fleshed out with equal gravity, every single backstory is given its due importance and all have their moments under the sun to shine bright, either with bitter-sweet humour or high-octane histrionics before a breakdown.

Given the duration of the play, a 120-minute watch with an interval of 10 minutes in between could have been a weary, monotonous experience for the spectators but a taut script and acting skills made sure that it never slackened in pace or dropped in rhythm. Incidentally, amidst this whole feminine-bonhomie, only two male characters (played by a single actor) rear their heads — a tea-vendor and an attendant — providing doses of situational fun and laughter in the arising context.

Television personality Tenaz Irani captures the pulse of a Parsi kirdaar — that of a middle-aged Dolly Soda Bottle Openerwala — with accuracy from the word go. The finer nuances come through her body language, her heavily accented Hindi with an emphasis on the ‘ta’ and ‘da’  pronunciations, her primness and propriety, her control freak mature, etc. She sets the ball rolling as the first passenger, who moves in with her luggage from the right end of the stage-wings. She does a double-duty in the play by donning the director’s hat besides acting and the play quite rests on her shoulders as most characters reveal their past via conversations with her or because of her interference in their private lives.

Dimple Shah, as Marathi mulgi Madhuri Kulkarni, is an awesome addition to the bandwagon. Her comic timing, expressions, voice modulation and acting prowess lend an extra bonus to her portrayal of a deprived wife and a mother beneath the facade of so-called new-age woman with a free, liberated soul working in the IT sector.

Priya Malik as a popular, glamorous and reserved small-screen star Sonya Kapoor, Kishwar Merchant as a stick-thin, bouncy, awestruck, star-gazing admirer Paramjeet Chaddha who has a totally different saga up her sleeve and Shweta Gulati as visibly upset and agitated corporate executive Pooja (without a surname) who grows suicidal after being disowned by her family and is a gay in the closet — do convincing justice to their characters in this attention-gripping drama.

Madhuri so long thought herself to be a progressive lady, marching quite neck to neck with her hubby, but confesses to marry him so that it lends their live-in relationship a stamp of formal recognition under societal pressures. Also, she acts on her husband Sudhakar’s behest to abort conceiving a baby in the pretext of global warming and terrorism issues and naively swallows anti-pregnancy pills as per alarms set on her cellphone by her better half. The world is such a bad place to bring up kids after all, his fake explanation easily dupes her but deep down she knew she could protect her child from the prevalent cruelty by narrating rollicking fables of Jungle Book and with boundless love, care and nurture, unload the heavy burden of studies from its bent back.

So this very same gullible samosa-digging filmi Madhuri converts into a bold, wise woman, determined to become a mother and give birth to a boy and a girl she already imagined to call Adwait and Rishika. She also solves an immediate task at hand — i.e. prodding the superhit gorgeous expecting actress to keep the baby alive and kicking inside her womb by inflicting her with caustic barbs and impels her to forget about losing her male fan-base due to marriage (till date kept under the wraps) and motherhood. She inspires her to live life on her own terms and reign the industry by writing her own rules if need be.