Akvarious Productions' new play SPUNK, which has opened at the third edition of the Writers' Bloc festival, reunites the writer-director duo of Siddharth Kumar and Akarsh Khurana, whose previous collaboration-THE INTERVIEW-hit the ball out of the park with its combination of dry wit and black humor. Blurb-wise, SPUNK certainly has a whacky premise.
Around the start of the play, we are asked to sneak a peek at a typical Mumbai scenario-one of those de rigueur auditions in which wanna-be actors strut their stuff in front of a casting team, replete with stagy dialogues and mobile numbers stuttered out by rote. Geetika Tyagi plays a producer, Anjali, who's trying to coax some effusiveness out of an impassive young man, Brijesh (Amol Parashar), trying to get him to play down the histrionics but play up his natural candor, without much success. She almost reaches the end of her tether, but because she sees a spark in the man (or she finds him attractive), she perseveres, trying to push the right buttons to draw him out of his shell. It's not that Brijesh is introverted, he is just emphatically non-descript and there is really nothing interesting about him except for one special talent, which he's pushed to reveal finally.
Mr Parashar, who looks like he has walked off the sets of one of his previous plays, DIRTY TALK, suddenly finds his metier, opening up before the camera, and going off on a deadpan spiel that is full of charm. With Ms Tyagi keeping time with perfect expressions of incredulity and the right interjections, the two actors pull off a really funny set-piece that one hopes would set the tenor of the rest of the evening's entertainment. The revelation-Brijesh is a young man whose semen seems primed to pass on only male chromosomes, and women impregnated by such semen would end up with male babies. While this has no scientific basis, it certainly sets up fertile ground for a tale with several implications and the play achieves the suspension of disbelief fairly quickly.
The third angle in this imbroglio is Rhea, played by Malaika Shenoy, who works at a sperm bank where Brijesh is a regular donor, and discovers the 'magic' qualities of his sperm, and hatches a fertility scheme by which she delivers his produce for an exorbitant sum, under the table, to parents who are certain they want a male child, and indeed there is a long line of such hopefuls, given that India has always had an unenviable track record in these matters. It's a sideline that keeps Brijesh smug and happy, and Rhea, a single mom, can hold on to her daughter, even as her estranged husband is breathing down her shoulder for the custody of their child.
Unfortunately, we don't quite get a lot more of the observational humor we start off with. As we progress into the play's running time, it does feel that the writer's digging himself into a hole. Mr Kumar has a hand on satire and a willingness to harness the darker side of human nature (as evidenced in his previous play), and in this play he tries to bring in a social conscience and an emotional quotient. On those counts, the play falters, vacillating between its several concerns without any satisfactory pay-off. It also proves that one cannot really ride the coat-tails of deliciously bawdy humor and awkwardly choreographed sex (always good for a laugh) beyond a point. There is a social commentary that the play attempts to weave in, but somehow it isn't strong enough. It is not expected that that this play should get all preachy and involve itself with apocalyptic scenarios of male babies overriding the nation (who knows whether the sons sired by Brijesh would inherit his talent), but with some subtlety maybe the play could reflect one of our society's more deep-rooted hypocrisies more unfavorably than it does.
Ms Shenoy is an actress of tested talent (she was particularly good in ALL ABOUT WOMEN), but her back story seems contrived to create undeserved empathy for a cold, calculating woman, who although given to laughing fits and an occasional pithy line, generates no real compassion. She treats her golden goose (Brijesh) with utmost insensitivity, and when the tables are turned, and the forces-that-be catch up with her 'quack' scheme, and she's about to lose her child in a burst of kitchen-sink melodrama, it only adds to more wearisome shenanigans on stage. All of this could have been part of an enterprise that sends up social mores in an imploding fashion, instead we are fed a couple of Marashtrain stereotypes (with a feisty Tahira Nath, and Umesh Jagtap, in a ill-advised cameo) in a cliched sub-plot that is funny to an extent, but it's almost besides the point. Of course, with Anjali wanting a baby too, Ms Tyagi gets extended time to expand on her delightful quirky persona on stage, and although she has issues with her vocal delivery (unlike Ms Shenoy whose enunciations are always perfect), she sets up Mr Parashar's performance in a way that his punch lines gets a lot more laughs.
There is a very promising sequence towards the end when Anjali (who actually can't bear children because of an accident) takes Brijesh for a spiritual outing, where a con-man (performed by Sumeet Vyas) holds sway as the head of some religious denomination. Mr Vyas and Mr Parashar, are spitting images of one another (after a kind), and seated opposite one another they create a sense of visual symmetry that is almost a character graph in itself. In the god-man is the future Brijesh, a progressive extrapolation of all his faculties, physical or psychological. Mr Parashar serves up a kind of unpolished naĩvete that serves his character of an unlikely (and reluctant) superhero well and Mr Vyas, cutting an imposing figure while smoking a cigar, betrays the kind of greasy slickness that promises to deliver Brijesh from his muddle. It gives us a visual context in which we can fit our leading man, and his destiny, and the power he could harness if he would only let go of his listlessness. Girl trouble is the least of his problems. As Mr Vyas speaks, although his homilies seem like a lot of hot air, there is a sense that he is delivering the play's raison d'être, the cornerstone of its philosophy. It's a compelling little scene, even if it may exist merely within the itinerant mind of a bored member of the audience.
Ultimately, the pedigree of this team has not been called into question. Mr Khurana has an astute sense of theatre that 'works'. SPUNK may be pushing the right buttons regarding the particular kind of patronage that it seeks, but it could have forged new ground with the material at its disposal. There is always the hope of a few rewrites that could make everything magically proper again.
Akvarious Productions' new play SPUNK, which has opened at the third edition of the Writers' Bloc festival, reunites the writer-director duo of Siddharth Kumar and Akarsh Khurana, whose previous collaboration-THE INTERVIEW-hit the ball out of the park with its combination of dry wit and black humor. Blurb-wise, SPUNK certainly has a whacky premise.
