Saddled with a divorce, a young girl child and the perennial challenges that the city of Mumbai throws up such as the crippling dependence on house help to the la-di-da society affairs, Suchitra Krishnamurthy played the ‘Drama Queen’ to the hilt to an audience that lapped it all up quite well.
Brought to Kolkata by Centre Stage Productions, the hour and a half long play which was a solo act by Suchitra, saw her take the audience through the ups and downs of her life, after being divorced from Shekhar Kapur. Her act included singing live, long pre-recorded telephone conversations with her forever disapproving mother, her close friends and even her fleeting love interests. Though perfectly capable and multi-talented (she’s an actor, writer and painter), she exaggerates her own fears and demons till they start playing havoc in her head and she has to resort to psychiatric help.
The largest of her problems seems to be the fact that she wants to find a man and get married. Such is her desperation that she even lands up proposing to men who are openly uninterested in marriage or are already taken.
Despite the play obviously being an exaggeration of her trials and travails, Suchitra pulls it off splendidly well, without it being a non-stop moan. Pithy doses of humor help. One can’t help but wonder though, that why didn’t the actor, who mostly played out her real life on stage, take a good hard look at herself and realize that she’s already everything she needs to be; marriage or no marriage.
However, in the end, she does set it all right and straight as she concludes the act with an exhibition of her paintings that even compels her mother to admit that she’s always been proud of her daughter. Her art exhibition interestingly is titled ‘The G-Spot!’