Ruckus over Theatre

Being an individual who is pretty used to being shaky (meaning I have stage-fright) in the presence of a large audience, I've had to force myself to participate in many public events (by public events I mean competitions/shows in front of large audiences :0) to get over this shakiness. So my latest venture in this arena was 'THEATRE'.

Being part of a theatre production has been a good learning experience. It was easier considering the fact that it was a part of my college activities or more precisely part of my department activities. In this manner everything was brought to life with a simple idea i.e forming a dept theatre club. Interestingly enough it started out on a good foot, then led to a fracture, followed by a time of healing but soon there was a sprain and finally a good performance. 

Funny enough it all began with me participating in the auditions just for 'fun'. I was surprised when I was selected, but I was happy and excited to try something new. Honestly this is one experience i'm never going to forget, not because it was so much fun in the 'end' but because of all the chaos it ensued in my life. Any production which is even remotely big should be 'managed' properly, but in this case 'mismanagement' was the word throughout the process.

The 'practice sessions' were not a big success in the beginning. Our main actors were working on another theatre production and couldn't attend the practices for over 2 weeks. The first 2 weeks were monotonous with script readings and no real practice sessions. By the way, we were doing script readings without a finished script. Yes, we had to manage with bits and pieces of the wonderful script courtesy our ever perfect director whose name i shall not mention as of now. As the days went by practice was becoming more like hell. Some of us would reach there on time to find that everyone else hasn't come, will come in a few hours or have just decided not to grace us with their ever grateful presence. Wow, doesn't that sound like fun!!!

Then after those long 2 weeks our main actors came and thank god they did. We then started practice properly, beginning with exercises and then moving on to the script which was still 'incomplete'. It was a struggle at first to get into character, for me personally. Just mere weeks before the play was to be put up, my character was swapped. Wow, how great was that?? It was a big struggle for me throughout the play to get into character because i couldn't seem to stop being myself. Later on we had a friend come in from another college and help us out. She was a savior and she really helped me out a lot, along with helping the rest of the cast. In reality she was the one who was actually directing the play and any member of the cast would agree with that statement. So finally we were rehearsing properly and enthusiastically.By the way i forgot to mention the fact that our designer had no idea as to what the story was about as our ever so perfect director shied away from telling her the story, how innovative of our director to come up with the 'find out the story on your own' mode. I finally narrated the entire story to her as she was completely exasperated. The same was the condition with our musician, as he wasn't given a script and was 'script-less', till i finally 'rescued' him and gave him the scripts that i had-on-hand. 

Boom, a big bomb gets thrown just a mere week before the play is to be staged. The venue allocation had gone haywire thanks to the undecided date of performance. At the same time our wonderful director decided that she was too 'intelligent' to bother with the script for the last scene (yes my dear friends, the script was still 'unfinished') and announced to the actors that they must 'improvise' it themselves. What a blow that was and what 'great timing'. The venue was somehow fixed towards the end and we all breathed a sigh of relief but all was not well. On the day of the performance we lost the venue as it was already booked by someone else. Couldn't they have mentioned this before rather than giving us the venue and then taking it back? We then decided another venue in our own dept, but we had problems there and we lost that venue too. With all hopes lost and at wits end, we made one more try to get a venue. Finally we got a venue and it was fixed. Then we moved to the venue, got everything prepared and were getting ready for the performance. Our director was about to leave citing illness, but somehow our friends convinced her to stick around. We all stood holding hands and said a few words of good will and then left to rock it out on stage. The performance began on a good note. Our set designer managed the set changes with finesse and our musician gave some awesome background scores that left your feet tapping. Everything went on well and my scenes went well too. We were all beyond happy by the end of it and that was the end of over a month long of hard work, lost appetites, angry screams, sleepless nights, hopeless tears and heartfelt smiles.

We got good applause from the audience and were to happy to know that they had enjoyed the play. Our teachers came up to congratulate us and so did our peers. It was then that the fact that the play was a success dawned on us. After a few group pictures we all left with a happy feeling at finally being over with this chaotic production and at seeing it be a grand success. In this manner a new venture came to an end. It was fun and exciting, but it was also hard and at times stressful and disheartening. So in the end the 3 idiots mantra comes to mind, "ALL IZZ WELL". :) :D ;) :P