Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh): Staging stories has always been considered a tedious task. The more difficult task is to adapt the story of a foreign storyteller and make it a drama. But under the leadership of Harshit Sharma, the creative theatre artiste of Ujjain, the Parishkriti Samajik Sanstha artistes staged the story of ‘O Henry’ by turning it into a play, courtesy Madhya Pradesh School of Natya Vidyalaya with a lot of hard work and imagination.
The play is usually performed on a stage, but in this experiment, a small space different from the traditional stage was first discovered and then the play was staged in the same audience. The audience got attached to the atmosphere of the play by finding all the actors around them. It was a different experience for them. Describing the play, the president of the organisation, Satish Dave, said that William Sydney Porter, (popularly known as O Henry), had his stories ending very differently.
Throughout the play, the actors proved themselves to be in line with those characters. Raju Khan (Soapy) sums up the complex personality sentiments well. Shubham Satyapremi (Mr D), Himanshi Tiwari (Lara), Anshul Patel (Peter, Charles), Chitendra Sisodia (Allen), Tejaswini (Jenny), Sachin (Bass), Rajveer (Bab) played their respective characters well. Creating a church scene with candles was an imaginative experiment, in the same way like turning a small space into a restaurant was a new one. The lighting made the play all the more impressive.
