For the old and the wonderful

For the old and the wonderful

Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal is back. This time as Violet Gonsalves, an inmate of an old people’s home. Narrating the hilarious incidents “which don’t shock the inmate and the staff, but will definitely shock the audience” that take place there, in a voice that is ‘consigned’ to her fate, she exposes the pathos underlying the existence of abandoned old people. Titled I Saw This Fellow’s What-do-you-call-it, the 15-minute monologue is one of the five pieces Kotwal has directed for her latest production Once I Was Young... Now I’m Wonderful.“It is a collage of works by American writers Jane Wagner and Robert Anderson and British writer Alan Bennet (who writes for the BBC) with a focus on old age. In a society that is so obsessed with youth and beauty ironically the most transient elements of life very little attention is paid to the older generation. The stereotypical portrayal of the ‘oldie’ is not reality and that is the focal point of the entire show,” points out Kotwal who is directing Hosi Vasunia, Shruti Sekhsaria and Malaika Shenoy, besides herself.

First-timers Shenoy and Sekhsaria get together for two of the monologues Integrity Is Not A Required Skill and I Can’t Be Uplifted Anymore. The first has Shenoy, who has just made her debut in The Company Theatre’s The Game of Love and Chance, playing Chrissy a typical Los Angeles ‘bimbette’ who spouts her own philosophy on life and Sekhsaria plays Eileen her friend. “The reason I have another character in the monologue besides the main one is to show reactions to what is being said,” says Kotwal. She has repeated the pattern in the other monologue as well. Set in a beauty parlour, it has Shruti, as Katie, holding forth on how she has to reflect standards she does not even understand and Lonnie (Shenoy) responding the best she can with her face under a mask.

What do these monologues have to do with changing the way old people are looked at? “Integrity... is a stereotypical portrayal of the young how they are all the same like cartoon characters! In the process it is showing something of the old how they are different. I Can’t... is about two women who are almost there, about 35 years of age. The underlying concept is about time it is ticking on for all the characters,” explains Kotwal.

For the first time this year Hosi Vasunia will don the mask of an actor as 50-year-old Gustad Vachcha who lives with his 72-year-old mother. “It is an original British script adapted by Mahabanoo. It is very relevant to what Parsees are going through and translates very well in the Indian context,” says Vasunia. “It was easy to adopt this piece, titled Chess Men, originally written by Alan Bennet. The mother-son relationship is universal and there are so many unmarried Parsees still residing with their parents. In this piece Gustad’s life takes a bizarre turn when his mother falls in love with an ‘older’ man,” says Kotwal. I’m Herbert is the last piece, a duet with Vasunia and Kotwal. “We play two very old people who are married to each other but were married many times before to other people.

Now they are so old that they can’t remember each other’s names and keep calling each other by names of their previous spouses. Names and events cause 15-minutes of total mental chaos providing the audience withenough to laugh at,” says Kotwal.

The idea for the production was conceived when Kotwal’s US-based son Kaizad Navroze Kotwal sent her some of the monologues written by Bennet, Wagner and Anderson. “As I kept reading, I saw how relevant the pieces were to the present context. I adapted two of them Chess Men and I saw this.. I got the idea for the title from an Emmy-award winning film directed by Kaizad I Was Young...Now I’m Wonderful. The attempt here is too focus on the irony that no one wants to grow old but everyone wants to live long. You start aging at conception, yet there are so many who are unwilling and unable to accept the process. With so much focus on beauty contests, the young and the hip, the old are forgotten.,” says Kotwal.

With about 90 days of practising under their belt, the actors are looking forward to the play opening next month. “All the pieces are very thought-provoking,” says Kotwal. “They may make you laugh a lot, maybe cry a little. But they will definitely make you think,” she pronounces.