A scene from "Mr & Mrs Nayyar," about a family whose child has thalassemia.The Express in India has a story about Sarita Vohra whose Living Room Theatre company uses comedy to explore issues such as thalassemia (a genetic blood disorder), multiple sclerosis and aging.
The curtain falls and the lights come on. Backstage, surrounded by the props, theatre director Sarita Vohra holds her breath. Has her experiment paid off? A heartbeat later, the audience rises as one and bursts into a loud ovation. Vohra has got her answer. She returns to the stage with the cast to take a bow.
“The audience has just watched a play on thalassemia and they’re grinning,” she says, smiling. Her forte is comedy and, for the last few years, her comedies have dealt with issues distinctly “un-comic”—street children, thalassemia, multiple sclerosis and ageing. And every time, she has succeeded in getting packed houses wipe away tears of laughter.
“Why can’t a thalassemic child be happy? Why can’t a multiple sclerosis patient still be his wife’s greatest love? And why can’t ageing be cheerful? These are the questions I ask myself when I work on a play. These issues may be serious, but they aren’t about never-ending gloom,” says Vohra, whose group Living Room Theatre began 20 years ago.
Her buzzword is “fun,” and it begins with the name of the plays.
The two plays on old age, for instance, are called 75...Not Out and Mallaika Sherraffat@oldagehome.com while the one on multiple sclerosis is called Mandy weds Sandy...Aur Phir.
She adds oodles of witty one-liners and Bollywood chartbusters. “There are lots of songs and dances and of course, images of the great Indian family, nosy neighbours and forbidden love,” she says.
Vohra has always been sensitive to the pain of others but she became more conscious of the hardships around her after her husband passed away a few years ago. She turned her back to the stage after his death, but friends forced her back. On the long road back to theatre, she realised that if there was a solution to sorrow, “it lay in positive thinking. And my theatre became a medium to spread that message,” says Vohra.
In the case of Mr and Mrs Nayyar about thalassemic children, Vohra hit on a foolproof plan to spread hope—she begins and ends with weddings. “I also made the thalassemic child a brat because he is pampered by everybody in the family. He is cheerful, a good dancer and grows up to be an engineer,” she says. In between the comic repartees, however, Vohra packs in messages like how thalassaemic minor parents should take the CVS test to determine if the foetus is a major.
“Under such circumstances doctors generally advise aborting the foetus. India has more than one lakh thalassemics, most of them in border states like Punjab, Bengal and Gujarat,” she says. Adds Poonam Bhalla, a former faculty of Lady Shri Ram College and a long-time part of Vohra’s troupe: “The challenge lies is portraying the parts so that the humour does not suppress the serious message and vice versa.”
Purists dismiss her plays but Vohra maintains that “theatre can work wonders where therapy often blunders.”
Helping her is a strong cast, ranging from prominent names of the city’s theatre circuit—Swadesh Mahan, Shashi Sharma and Kavita Sharma-to newcomers like Smriti Kalra. Others like Sarwjeet Jha, a company director off-stage, learnt the nitty-gritty of acting during past performances and will be a part of Vohra’s new production, a play called Urban Tarka, that deals with drunken driving.
