CURTAINCALL: THE MONSOON STAGE
The National Academy of Performing Arts’ (Napa) month-long theatre festival that concluded last week brought certain realisations to one’s mind. The most significant of these was that an off-season festival remains logistically possible despite heavy monsoon rains that have a tendency to make everything else grind to a halt in Karachi.
Aptly titled Jashan Sawan Ka (A Celebration of the Monsoon), four plays were presented each weekend, with Thursdays reserved for media previews. Some truly uniquely experimental, adapted and musical works were showcased during the festival.
Napa alumnus Fawad Khan directed the first play of the festival titled Lights Out, about a couple that hears a woman’s screams from afar and wonders what to do about it, in an intense dramatisation of fear and apathy towards pain and misery.
The second play, Heer Project, directed by Zain Ahmed, was an interesting experimentation in the genres of the performing arts — dance, theatre and music — along with poetry, to enforce various messages regarding women’s issues. It was performed entirely from women’s perspectives.
Napa’s recently concluded off-season theatre festival once again drove home Napa’s contribution to the arts and to society
The third play, Dead End, directed by Sunil Shankar, was a stark characterisation of the cut-throat market forces that trivialise human engagement and existence. Uzma Sabeen’s Pooja was the final play, a musical tale of two princes who fall in love with the same girl!
Napa director and teacher Uzma Sabeen typified the audience reaction, expressing pleasure at the experience which provided her a break from children’s theatre. “Many acquaintances came to see the plays and the people in the audience brought along their relatives who were visiting from abroad,” she says. “This aspect was particularly interesting for me.”
Napa Festival Director Zain Ahmed points out that there hadn’t been any theatre activity since the beginning of the year. “So the team decided to test the waters by running an off-season festival, which defied the normal practice of organising such festivals when the weather is more pleasant — from November to March,” he said. “This is the time of year when people are usually away vacationing.”
But it turned out in favour of Napa in the end. The crowds showed up at the 200-seat Repertory Theatre in droves, packed to capacity almost every night. “Some nights we had more than 200 people who couldn’t find seats and had to sit on the floor,” says Zain.