expensive or dates were difficult to get because groups had booked them in bulk. So the only option was to go for competitions and college fests initially. But gradually we worked around a very sustainable and innovative business model which helped us in organizing our very own public show within months! b) Too many people were interested in joining us for the heck of it and very few were interested in working their asses out. The filtering was a long drawn process, and the number of members who wore theatre like a fashionable tattoo on their sleeves were too many. Gradually we managed to narrow it down to people who would risk every thing just to ensure that a prop is in place or the auditorium taxes are paid in time!
Who are some of your influences and are there any theater contemporaries in Kolkata or otherwise that have inspired your own work? I will try and give a cohesive list! a) When we started out, we really looked upto Tin can. They were a young group, just like us, and had spearheaded the youth theatre “movement” in the city if you can call it that. Their productions “video” and “intro” were literally theatre for the MTV generation. And though had disbanded way before we were formed, this was one group we really could relate in terms of wavelength and overall ambition. b) The Bengali group theatre scenario kind of
A scene from a Play by M.A.D
alienated us because of it’s same old hackneyed formula and content and treatment that failed to acknowledge the times. However, there has been directors and playwrights who have really managed to teach and inspire us because they had the “spark” that made them stand out in the crowd of the so called stalwarts of Bangla theatre. They are Suman Mukhopadhyay, Kaushik Sen, Chandan Sen and Bratya Basu! We had a brief chance of working