Play: The Final Rehearsal

News from Vaishnavi -

The Final Rehearsal, an extremely interesting and experimental play by Mr. Pawan Kumar is scheduled for 17th March at Ranga Shankara. The play is in the aid of The Heart and Soul Foundation which runs Punarvasan – a school for disabled kids amongst the urban poor in and around Chamarajpet.

The play was a part of the opening festival at Ranga Shankara too and has been a sell out. Tickets are available at - Alliance' Francaise, Calypso and Ranga Shankara.

A brief write up on the play follows:
Theme
If we look around us and make a conscious effort to find something which is common to everything, which is present everywhere, we find that it is “Competition”. This is what The Final Rehearsal is all about. How does a person handle this entity called competition? And what is he or she trying to prove at the end of it? And is there an end to it? Without saying it directly, the play very subtly projects a message showing to what extent a person can go when he or she is under the influence of competition.

Synopsis
The play starts off with an actor rehearsing a monologue for an acting competition. When through with it, he interacts with the audience telling them how he had not been awarded the ‘Best actor’ award previously and his belief that he will make it this time. Throughout the performance the protagonist keeps playing different roles, Mark Anthony from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a young boy who is molested in the riots of Gujarat, a rag picker named Gandhi etc. Towards the end, the protagonist decides to have a final rehearsal of the monologue before he goes to the competition and he starts rehearsing but it turns out that the lines are similar but not the same. Does the actor win the award, or does it push him down the depth of sanity?

The play, in a certain sense a commentary on the daily rat race that we all go thro’, keeps the audience occupied and thinking and relating to every bit of the script with a lot of humorous incidents being staged in an extremely creative fashion. If that is one facet of the play, the other is about the protagonist’s life, his dreams, his goals, his struggles and his passion for his work; and when everyone disowns an actor, do his props leave him too? A performance of 65 minutes, it takes the audience, laughing, through his entire life with music, mime and lot of special effects, allowing the audience to relate with the character and fall in love with him.

The Final rehearsal is a one hour duration play; written and directed by Pawan Kumar. It has won the Best Actor award at the Youth theatre festival Thespo4 conducted in Mumbai, in December 2002 by ‘Theatre group, Bombay’; the play was also nominated for Best Script, Best Direction, Best Production Design and Best Play. It has done 7 successful runs in Bangalore and 3 in Bombay.

About Pawan Kumar
Pawan started his foray into theatre at a very young age. All of 14 and he wrote, directed and acted in the play ’Straws of Justice’ which won the Best Creative presentation award at ACT 1, The Times Playfest. He has acted in plays like ‘Cartoons’ and ‘The elephant and the mice’ produced by the Bangalore Little Theatre. He started a theatre club called “Center stage” in PESIT, and made plays like ‘Hare and the tortoise’, ‘The dinosaur’, ‘The Cause’, ‘You are your own savior’. Four years hence, his play ‘The hare and the tortoise’ is still winning awards at various festivals. He joined ‘The Script’ Theatre Company later and actively participated in the Playback Theatre movement, till date he has performed in almost a hundred shows of Playback Theatre. He quit college after two years of engineering study. Pawan has now become a full time theatre consultant doing numerous workshops and plays.

Thanks, Vaish!