By Express News Service BENGALURU : Think of a staged play and the first thing that comes to mind is an elaborate set or costumes. But this Bengaluru-based production is aiming to shake things up with their upcoming play, titled A Funny Thing Called Life. According to the play’s director and playwright Prashanth Kumar Nair, who is also the artistic director of Tahatto, “The idea of the play came from a very functional question: What if we had a play that didn’t need elaborate sets or costumes to tell stories that happen across a multitude of spaces and landscapes? We took up that challenge and wrote sketches that allowed us to move into any space with just a suitcase and three chairs.” One of the stories will look at two strangers who meet at an airport Since then, the play has allowed the team to go into not just performance spaces but also cafes, pubs, libraries, galleries, lounges, conference halls and even homes. But while the performance venue changed, the plot remained the same: Six original stories that depict everyday situations everyone encounters. Some of these stories include two strangers meeting at an airport, a pair of statues in a park that come alive and have an argument and a conversation between an auto-drive, a passenger and the audience. Humour is a common thread in all the six stories, used as a “great Trojan horse to converse with an audience about experiences that are difficult to articulate.” Nair cites the example of the story The Last 10 Minutes to explain. The story follows the life of a regular techie who is visited by a mysterious figure telling him that he has only 10 minutes to live. “Now the protagonist needs to scamper to pack all his life’s aspirations in those 10 minutes. The sketch usually leaves the audience in splits, but asks some relevant questions about the fragility of life, the meaning of death, and what are we endlessly working and slogging the prime of our lives for,” says Nair. The play has previously been performed in Hyderabad, Chennai and Kochi as well but Nair reveals that rehearsal still goes on for 8-10 hours before every new show. The 70-minute play features actors Kalyani Kumar, Nithya Rao, Shalini Rao, Badarivishal Kinhal, Piyush Agarwal, Prashanth Nair and Venkataraghavan, and will be staged at Lahe Lahe Santhe on August 24 and 25 at 7.30pm.

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