The Wedding Album Afterthoughts

For our second session, we chose to read Girish Karnad's 'The Wedding Album'. Aishwarya, Saumil, Nikki, Nitin and Pramida were the readers managing the difficult task of enacting a total of 16 different characters!!

All in all, we have to say that it was another successful reading session. Saumil was tasked at being Rohit and Mira at the same time and the task of managing both was interesting. It took a real funny twist when Rohit (Saumil ) started to imitate a woman. Pramida tried to do a guy's voice being tasked with a male/female role in one act! Did a fairly poor job but Saumil managed to bring in roaring laughter! All the other characters did well – Aishwarya as Hema, Vidula’s sister was a thorough entertainer.

Chai with Girish Karnad!

The play opens to Rohit trying to make a video of Vidula in conversation to be sent to her fiancé in America. The expectation is that the two would wed in an imminent wedding that will hopefully occur. The "hopefully" has been added on because Vidula and the potential groom still have an option to make that final decision. The story walks through emotionally charged conversations amongst the various family members, relatives keen on seeing Rohit married into their family, a 10 year old boy infatuated with Vidula’s sister and other crazy mishaps along the way.

As a group, we were not too enthralled with the play (perhaps because Girish Karnad has set a really high bar for himself). Even though it had some interesting dialogues, parts of the play were a little bit on the vulgar side and we were not too thrilled about it. Contemporary educated middle class families do continue to marry without meeting their respective to be spouses, have strange demons in their closets and to an extent the portrayal was just but it felt a bit exaggerated and interspersed with preachy dialogues. 

Comeplayalong rating 2.5 *

-Nikki & Pramida