TENDERNESS
Theatre (2012)“Director Amitesh Grover unsettles notions of gender, love, morality and ethics” - The Indian Express
“This bold play explores the labyrinth that is the contemporary teenage mind.” - The Asian Age
“We were trying to get to this place—it was me and you, I think, and some other people—and it was a little like my house … Although, well, it was my house, but it didn’t look like my house, somehow. And we were trying not to be seen.”
Tsiolkas’s Ugly is a study of frustration through the lens of a high-school drop out (Slim), who commits a seemingly senseless act of violence. Patricia’s SLUT takes its cue from a horrific real-life teen shooting spree incident. It generates a fictionalised history of the killer’s ‘lover’, dubbing her ‘Lolita’, and speculates on what kind of personal story might lie behind the tabloid label of a ‘party girl’. These instances open a disturbing and macabre world of the teenage playground where notions of gender, sexuality, love, aspirations and hate create a world of disorder and chaos. Does being a Youth necessarily mean to be 'volatile"? Is it to be read alongside normative notions of childhood development where we go from being child, teenager to adult in some kind of ahistorical vacuum?
I situate the brutal world of this play in the undulated expanse of a skatepark. It provides ‘endless’ lines to ride through, fabricating and discarding notions of selfhood. Inside, characters perform the slippery turf that is adolescence, an intensely contested territory between locations of childhood and adulthood. Here, the teen image contains not only agreement and commonality but the antagonism and contradiction buried within a common experience of becoming an adult.
Text based on SLUT by Patricia Cornelius and UGLY Christos Tsiolkas | Directed by Amitesh Grover | Acting Coach Tushar Pandey | Space Design by Anagram Architects | Set & Electronic Design by Vishnu Barve | Dance Coach Rajan Rathore | Grafitti by Anpu Varkey | Figurines by Rishu Shankar | Photography by Thyagarajan S | Cast - Kalyanee Mulay, Himanshu Kohli, Sanal N., V. Uto Chishi, Anupam Dutta, Thoudam Victor Singh, Bharati, D. Anthony Janagi. Design Assistants - Sarika Pareek, Jeetrai Hansda | Produced by National School of Drama, India
