The Gadha has moved on…

Dear friends,

Now as the gadha is gone after two weekends of wonderful performances of EK THA GADHA URF ALADAD KHAN, I wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you who came to watch the show. This was the first time we did more than one weekend of a play in Hindi – and we certainly had doubts if there was enough of a market in Seattle for 6 shows of a play in Hindi – but a couple of near sold out opening weekend performances and another two sold out shows to finish our run answered that question quite convincingly!

A special thanks to the entire cast – who worked through a pretty complex preparation period for a show with this many players in it. Their willingness to work around all the different conflicts and commitments was crucial for us to get sufficient rehearsal time. The nature of this play required us to break up our rehearsals in a way that hindered natural arc development, and we were all perhaps a little nervous going into the week before the show – but there was nothing little about the determination and dedication shown by the entire team to create another huge success.

Without an effective crew, no cast can give their best. Our technical crew stepped up to support the project and did a terrific job. This was the first time we actually constructed a set (other than grabbing furniture from our own living rooms!) Our set design team came through with a stable, light and time effective way to build the frames, and then decorated it with as much color as one can put on a stage! Maggie Lee did a terrific job with light design, and enough can not be said about the fantastic job our music team did in composing and executing the songs! A big thank you to those who work in the shadows to make the rest of us shine in the lights.

One of the most critical aspect of a production are the box office staff, ushers and other volunteers who are the face of the production team and welcome our guests to each show. Many thanks to each of our volunteers who managed the front lobby and the doors with professional grace and ease. Thank you.

Just as much as the cast and crew, we are thankful to their families, friends, employers, managers, roommates and hiking buddies – who too have to make a lot of sacrifices. If it wasn’t for supportive spouses and cooperative bosses, our productions would never work!

And last, but certainly not the least – all our volunteers, PR personnel, card distributors, email forwarders, word spreaders, webmaster, friends and supporters – we thank you for your help. Theatre is a team sport, and without the support of a complete and dedicated team like yourselves, the Pratidhwani Drama Wing would not be able to put together the shows it has been able to, and hopes to continue to do in the future.

Thank you all for all your support to EK THA GADHA. We’ll see you soon at the next production!

-Agastya
Lead, Pratidhwani Drama Wing

It Takes A Village

I last took part in a drama back in fifth grade when I played Shravan Kumar who carries his blind parents for pilgrimage in baskets hanging from his shoulders. It was a play in Sanskrit. Later in sixth grade, I was given the role of Satyvan, another story from Mahabharata.

Some of the cast members backstage

Taking part in a play as an adult, I’m astounded by how much effort it takes to bring out a production. Actors do numerous rehearsals, of course, but there’s so much more that goes on behind the scenes. Singers recording music, costume coordinator making sure characters are rightly dressed, props coordinator analyzing the prop list, buying them from various stores, eBay, craigslist, etc., borrowing heavy furniture from friends and well-wishers, set designer putting together a fabulous set, stage manager herding the actors, web designer building a website, publicity-in-charge spreading the word, ushers keeping the house in order, and I’m sure I’ve missed at least dozens other tasks. Often one person wears more than one cap. It truly takes a village.

And there must be a person to coordinate all this. I put myself in a director/producer’s mode for a moment and my mind boggled: he does not only cajoling the actors to get them to do what they are supposed to do, but also the production, scheduling, booking, selling, printing, copying, promoting, … all while holding a full-time job. Directing and producing a play is a labor of love and one must truly love it to step into it.

I should know. Back in 1994 I founded Wordsmith.org, an online community of wordlovers in some 200 countries. For years I kept it running in my “spare” time while making a living as a software engineer. Eventually I gave up my career in computing for the love of words.

When you love something with all your heart, it comes across. It shows. Love makes the world, or at least a play, go round.

Ultimately, big kudos to Agastya for his expert eye in casting, directing, and producing this show. It’s he who molded us from Anu to Juggan, Shahana to chintak, Roshith to sutradhar, and so on.

Making so many discrete parts come together and work like a well-oiled machine — it does take an engineer after all. I feel privileged to be part of such fun loving, dedicated, and talented cast and crew. Way to go!

Getting in the Mode

Anu Garg as Juggan with Roshith

My character Juggan dhobi loses his donkey (which sets into motion a strange chain of events) and has much rona dhona in the story. And a dhobi does dhona anyway, here he just has to add rona. Director Agastya advised me not to pretend but to be the character. He said, “You’re going to hate me for this, but to really portray the pain, you have to feel the pain.”

I have to admit it took me a while before I got into the mode. Eventually I did feel the pain, I did become the character, but that created another problem. I felt bereaved and helpless.

I started missing my cues: when I’m supposed to leave the stage, what direction I’m supposed to go in the stage and out, and so on. I truly felt lost, and dependent on my buddy Natthu darzi and relying on his leading me when it was time for me to leave the stage.

That illustrates the conflicting demands on an actor: he has to feel the character, be the character, yet maintain an other aware self that keeps tracks of stage directions, cues, dialogs, etc.

And not only that. As he goes on and off stage, he has to switch his persona, often multiple times in a matter of just a few seconds.

Ultimately, stage is a reflection of life and vice versa. We do switch our persona often. One moment we are father, another a husband, at 10am I might be playing the role of businessman, in the afternoon that of a dog walker. We have a whole repertoire of masks that we change from day to day, week to week, moment to moment.

It should not be surprising that the word person comes from a Greek word meaning mask.

Peeling the Layers

Every time I go through another round of rehearsal, another light bulb goes on in my mind, another layer in the play comes to the surface. I realize that Sharad Joshi was no everyday writer.

The interconnections among the various characters, the foreshadowing that plants a tiny seed in our mind, and we don’t realize until later that what happened was alluded to earlier.

Each character has a distinct personality. No generics here. Even the donkey is a unique character even though he can’t speak and he never shows up on the stage. Not only does he have a name, he has his own mind, he has whims.

Yes, he’s a dhobi’s gadha, even like a child to him. You can’t force him to do anything. He moves when he feels like it. And often it’s the Juggan dhobi who has to listen to his darling gadha Aladad than the other way around.

And Aladad, the donkey, even does acting, to quote Juggan: “पान नहीं खाता था वो, मगर हाँ नाटक करता था, और खूब करता था!”

Satire Works Well: Review by Sandeep Krishnamurthy

I recently attended a performance of EK THA GADHA URF ALADAD KHAN organized by the Pratidhwani group in Seattle.

Although the promotional materials made me think I was attending a light-hearted comedy, what I experienced was a well-performed and deeply thought provoking political satire.

The play was a powerful critique of government and its asymmetric impact on the citizenry.  It was about pooling of power among the elites in a political system that do not care about the proverbial “common man.”  The drama was quite an indictment of the intelligentsia who were portrayed as brilliant theoreticians with no spine. It was equally unsparing of the amorphous, nameless and ruled masses and their inability to impose any limits on the elites. The performance made me think of how those in institutional roles co-opt their limited mandates for private rather than public good in the process reducing the government to a club where few gain and the poor lose.  Although the play loosely describes a nawab, many of the adaptations situated it well in today’s society- the nawab readily reminded us of today’s bumbling leaders.

Satires work well when the undercurrents are exposed in the greater narrative structure.  One theme that resonated with the audience referenced the limitations that governments impose on free speech and free will.  Simply nodding to the nawab and the kotwal rather than recording dissent is the ultimate surrender of free will and the first symptom of rot in a political system.  Another theme that was well represented focused on how the experience of the common man is politicized by power groups in search of symbols.  Rather than the calculus of crime and punishment, the nawab ultimately cares only about the symbolism of the death of the common man.

The play was a professional effort by several enthusiastic volunteers of a burgeoning South Asian theater community in Seattle.  Mukesh Dimri was masterful in the role of nawab exhibiting a profound stage presence along with the ability to remember hundreds of lines.  Gurvinder played the corrupt kotwal with convincing elan.

Satires work well when the level of humor is optimal.  Too little and it sounds like a critique.  Too much and you have lost depth and nuance.  In this case, the humor made the play more watchable and accessible.  Perhaps, a few attendees did not get the depth of some of the jokes- but that is to be expected with any satire.

Overall, a professional job by all involved.  In addition to the actors and those who worked behind the scenes, congratulations are due to the prolific Agastya Kohli for making drama relevant to the South Asian community in the Seattle area.

Sandeep Krishnamurthy

Sandeep Krishnamurthy is the Associate Director, Graduate Services and Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce at the University of Washington Bothell. He obtained his PhD from the University of Arizona in marketing and economics. He has developed and taught several innovative courses related to E-Commerce to both MBA and undergraduate students. He has written extensively about E-Commerce. Most recently, he has published a 450 page MBA textbook titled- “E-Commerce Management: Text and Cases”. His scholarly work on E-Commerce has appeared in journals such as Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Quarterly Journal of E-Commerce, Marketing Management, First Monday, Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Service Marketing. His writings in the business press have appeared on Clickz.com, Digitrends.net and Marketingprofs.com. His comments have been featured in press articles in outlets such as Marketing Computers, Direct Magazine, Wired.com, Medialifemagazine.com, Oracle’s Profit Magazine and The Washington Post. Sandeep also works in the areas of generic advertising and non-profit marketing.

Pratidhwani’s ‘Gadha’ is Masterful: Review by Shalini Koduri

Bring together a narcissistic Navab, his bum-kissing, worthless advisors and the death of a washerman’s donkey, and you get a brilliant political satire masquerading as a light-hearted comedy.  Watch and laugh as the Navab and his advisors endeavor toward self-deification with a magnanimous and almost certainly unprecedented gesture of a state funeral for none other than a donkey, misunderstood by them to be an ordinary man adored by the public.  Keep laughing as they realize their mistake and scramble to fix it…or not.

I suspect for as much his entertainment as for the audience, director Agastya Kohli has done an exceptional job of assembling and inspiring talented cast and crew to set alight the stage with this story.  You know the play is good when the audience is audibly laughing – and so is the director!

Mukesh Dimri as the Navab is positively extraordinary.  He has got the walk, he has got the talk, and he has got the attitude of a real Navab.  However, I have questions:  did he intern with a real Navab to prepare for the role?  How did the cast keep from laughing as he deliriously expounded upon his own greatness?

Anu Garg as Juggan Dhobi is uproarious and was my favorite.  Poor guy, he loses his companion; his business partner; his donkey (no pun intended).  Wandering aimlessly and grief-stricken, he can find no solace.  At first I shook with laughter every time he so emphatically took Aladad’s name; he actually made grief funny.  However, later I confusedly found myself mourning along with.

The whole experience was enhanced by beautiful music and songs and befitting lighting.  The crew did an exceptional and seamless job.

The venue is one of my favorites – the Ethnic Cultural Theater at the University of Washington.  It is cozy, and there is not a bad seat in the house.  It is a place to feel at home and to feel like a part of the action.  The tone is set even before curtain time when Agastya comes out to welcome the audience, advocate the theater experience, and raffle tickets to other shows.

See this play for your entertainment, but you’ll walk out with perhaps a changed perspective.  I’ll not give you more details – the magic is in how it unfolds…

Wishing you tears of humors and so much more,

Shalini Koduri  5/7/2009

Show runs thru this weekend: May 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th.

All play and no work?

It is a lot of fun to participate in a play. But it’s not all fun when it comes to preparations and performing. There is so much that goes into a play. We started meeting twice or three times a week practicing for hours at-a-time. And that’s just the actors. Agastya I’m sure spent hours before and after the practice thinking through the scenes, coordinating music, and gathering props etc. All of us have our jobs, family and other responsibilities on top of this. So it was an intersting challenge to juggle work and play. Thanks to all our families – without their support it wouldn’t be possible to be able to make this happen.

As we started practicing our dialogs, our focus on memorizing lines. How happy I was when I was finally able to go (somewhat) off-book! But I was less than half-way. After you remember your lines is when you can start paying attention to other details – like your movement on stage, your interactions and responses to other actors and their dialogs. Once we were somewhat able to remember our lines, Agastya started ‘blocking the scenes’ – basically deciding our movements and interactions on stage. I wish we had video recorded our first blocking of a scene and the performance on stage for the same scene – I’m sure there’s a huge difference between those two

Shahana already talked about effects of changing a location in her blog entry. I’m sure it is true for a lot of us – getting familiar with the stage was a lot of work and fun. We spent 3-4 hours in the theater every evening after work for 4 days before the show (again, kudos to our families and friends for the support! Most of us probably left home in the morning to go to work, then show up at the theater directly at 6:30 and only get home at 11:30 PM for four days straight). It gave us the familiarity we needed with the stage and the surroundings. The venue felt like home on Friday
The days of the actual performance are something else. We need to show up ahead of time to finish our dinner (or lunch on Sundays), voice exercises and get ready for the show. Even if we’re careful (thanks to the ’strong recommendations’ from our director) to not indulge in any potentially harmful activities through the last two weeks, you can’t avoid every problem. Shringar got sick on Sunday. But she pulled through the show marvelously. It is extremely inspiring to be part of this cast and get to know these amazing individuals on and off the stage!

This doesn’t mean there’s no fun though. Finishing the performance, and walking out into the audience from the ‘backstage entrance’ in our costumes.. that’s a great feeling and a lot of fun to meet with friends and family and hear their opinions, things that surprised them, things that they enjoyed.
It is also a lot of fun to hang out and get to know the cast and crew members. And laughing! The reason why we can stand on stage, say the funniest things and not laugh is because we’ve already done the whole rolling-on-the-carpet-with-watering-eyes laughter part (multiple times!) during our practices. Be in because of someone’s dialogs, or the constant leg pulling that goes on after the scenes! So – it’s not all work and no play, but it’s not all play and no work either. Equilibrium.

Energy up!

So, tomorrow night we’re going on show again. This is my first experience with putting up a series of shows over two weekends and delivering performances with sustained energy. For a single show of any performance, there is the usual pre-show nervous excitement, and the post-show euphoria, where you get to throw your head back and bask in the glory of how well you did (or feel sheepish for all the slip-ups) … and then go home.

In performing a series of shows like we are for Ek Tha Gadha, not only is the above not the case, but there is a quality of energy one has to cultivate, that must come simultaneously with a sense of detachment, which is quite difficult to do. The energy must be such that it pumps new blood into every single performance – afresh and anew. The accompanying detachment must be such that there is no obsession with yesterday’s laurels or failures, the crowd’s variable response, the lights or music or anything else, really. Every (performance) day is a new day, and it must be greeted as such - a true existential test!

So here we go again, rehearsing one last time tonight, and on show tomorrow! Attachment low and Energy up!

Computer Engineers as Drama Actors

The week before a show opens is called tech week because that’s when all the technical aspects, such as lights, sound, etc. come together. But if you count all the engineers we have in our cast, every week is tech week.

If we changed the sign outside the theater to ETG Software (Ek Tha Gadha), it wouldn’t be too far off. More than half the cast members are engineers, software and hardware, and everything in between. We have testers, we have design specialists. We even have a budding lawyer among us, just the right person for the corporate counsel.

It may be surprising to see so many engineers under the theater’s roof, but then again may be not. After all, it seems to be a law: if you are an Indian and you live in the Seattle area, you have to be an engineer (or be married to one).

Weekend #2 approacheth!

Shringar becoming a darbari

After a hectic tech week, and an exciting weekend of three incredible performances, we got a little break. Monday was the first day after a long time that had a sense of normalcy for me. Tuesday – I actually took the bus to work, like I normally do, and came back straight home from work… and literally had nothing to do during the evening hours other than rest and relax!

Roshith hanging out

But now, Wednesday is over – and the gadha will pick up some pace again. Thursday evening, we meet once more after a break of three days for our ‘pick up’ rehearsal. The point of this rehearsal is just to brush off any cobwebs that may have settled on our brains, as far as lines are concerned. No props, no costumes, no set – but we’ll run through the play in our rehearsal space (aka my living room!) and make sure we remember our lines, cues, entries and exits. Warmed up, we’ll be ready to hit the stage come Friday!

While the cast/crew has not assembled in the last three days, there have been various email and photograph exchanges – including some fantastic backstage pictures that Manisha took. Even though I directed this show, I don’t get to hang out with the cast backstage before the performances, so these pictures were a window into an unknown world for me as well – and I really enjoyed seeing *most* of them.

Ramkali!

However there were a few that I had trouble with – not because there was anything wrong with the pictures… but perhaps I consider the craft of theatre to be sacred – a little more than I probably should – and these pictures offended that sense of sanctity. May be I should ease up a little… what’s the point of it all if we can’t have a little fun!?

Krishnan is ready to go!

Regardless – the pictures you see along with this post are the ones that brought a smile to my face and warmth to my heart. Perhaps next week, I’ll share the rest of the pictures of hooligonism with you!

Our three remaining performances are Friday the 8th and Saturday the 9th at 8:00PM, and we close on Sunday the 10th with a show at 2:00PM. I hope you’ll come down and check out our little play!