This one Lushin Dubey chooses to call her most toughest play ever.
After all, it first struck her mind nine years ago when her United Airlines aircraft was grounded at the London Airport for fear of a terrorist strike on the fateful day of September 11, 2001.
Lushin’s play interestingly titled Untitled has been staged at important venues — the World Bank, Harvard, the Smythsonian and even the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and is now ready to have a public premier in Mumbai this week.
Speaking to After Hrs from New York, the Delhi-based theatre director says, “This play brought a lot of firsts for me — my first play in Hindi, my first with puppets and the first time I was going solo on the stage.”
Untitled (an Ace play) is Lushin’s gift to the city on Women’s Day. Lushin recalls, “While I was grounded in London, I saw a programme on TV about how an Afghani American woman went to Afghanistan to document the plight of women living there. That’s how the thought materialised. This is not a pitiable cry for help but tells women to recarve their own destiny. It challenges the stereotype.”
For Untitled, the title of the play denoting thousands of voiceless women across the world, Lushin has borrowed from two texts — Vijayadan Detha’s Nyari Nyari Maryada and Dario Fo’s Medea. And it was a challenge to combine two bi-lingual texts together, both belonging to totally different eras.
Lushin explains, “The play that is a mix of English and Hindi puts across beautifully the plight of women across borders. But it requires a lot of concentration to play 15 characters on the stage all by yourself.”
