There lived a donkey. I know you must be wondering about what has donkey to do with theatre and Sastry. Well my debut in theatre is a play called Ek Tha Gadha! It is a Hindi play written by Sharad Joshi and hugely popular. Through this blog I am sharing my experience of how it all happened.
As explained in part 1, I learnt basics of theatre through a weekend workshop that ended in May 2015. In pursuit of my desire to continue in theatre, I decided to join Samahaara’s Production oriented workshop. This workshop was from Monday to Friday 7 to 9 pm and the duration is eight weeks. At the end of the workshop we will be performing a play in front of the ticketed audience.
The workshop started on 15th June 2015. The total participants were eight. All of them are mostly youngsters including college students or professionals in 25 to 30 age group. I am the only aged person but still young and active. Our coach/ director was Nagaraju Petchai who is into theatre and is pursuing his PhD.
The first three weeks were spent teaching all aspects of acting. It involved lot of exercises and team activities. Doing them along with youngsters was a challenge for me but I was able to cope up since I am maintaining my physical fitness for a long time.
The director has chosen Ek tha Gadha as the play and distributed the script to us at the end of the third week. It was a very long play and had more than 14 characters where as we are eight people only. Hindi is also a concern for us and was worried. We brought this up with our director and he has put his foot down saying that he has confidence in the script and on us. So we did not have a choice.
The first step for us is to study the play fully and understand it thoroughly. I could not spend time properly for this during week days but managed to get some time during weekends. It took us almost three weeks to arrive at shortened version of the play and the duration was roughly one hour.
Auditions were conducted for the main roles and the other roles were chosen by us. So I got dual roles of Nattu Darji and Chintak.
We had less than three weeks of rehearsal and it was a difficult time. I had trouble with my dialogues and also coordination with fellow actors. As we went through rehearsals I have overcome these difficulties through practice and hard work. The director has also added his colour by designing scene by scene movements and tips to enhance our performance. By the end of the 7th week we got confidence and got ready for our first performance on August 8th at Green Gables International School. Our show was promoted onBookmyshow.com and tickets were sold.
Finally the D day has arrived on 8th August. I was initially nervous but gathered strength. And what a performance it was in front of the full audience. It was a huge hit and greatly appreciated.
We did two more shows at Green Gables International School (9th and 15th August) and both the shows were greatly appreciated by audience.
Having performed three shows will not satisfy an actor unless he gets a chance to perform at Lamakaan. We got that chance finally on 30th August and we received very good response there also.
So in conclusion I have made my debut as an actor and felt happy.