The Greatest Play

I've worked in five award winning plays.. er.. during the school days though and directed a couple of them too. I was in put in the 'C' section from my 6th to 10th grade and it turned out to be the best batch ever. 'A' section was good in studies, 'B' in nothing and 'C' in everything and I was proud to lead the class during those years.

I directed my first play in 6th grade. It was a very strong story about poverty and corruption (not mine!) and we won the first price competing with the students from 7th and 8th grade! It was a great Nov 14th. And in 7th grade, we staged a play on de-forestation issue where animals protested on highways and in front of government buildings. We again won the first place since the judges thought we "said a good message in a very funny way" (that's how our head-mistress termed it).

During 8th grade we did a more powerful one - the 'Babri Masjid' incident. We enacted it with such clarity that it was selected for the annual day play. In the 9th grade it was about some freedom fighter 'Kumaran' and I played the lead role. It was just ok considering our own standards, but compared to the other plays in the competition, we were too good. We won the first prize for four years in a row and no one was surprised.

So far there was no language constraints and we obviously chose Tamil over English for all our plays since we felt it would reach the audience better. But all of a sudden the school management decided to have a 'English' skit competition during the same year as they thought it would do justice to be a 'English Medium' school. It was new to me and my team. I'm not a story writer, I just direct plays. So I chose a story from a book I read over the summer holidays. It was a simple story and it had the right elements to be staged as a English play. It was a story of a poor youngster helping a old man and winning rich rewards from God (!).

We all worked hard. I worked on the dialogues with my English instructor for hours. There were only totally five characters and I played the lead role (so selfish of me :)). We staged the play before the entire class to get their feedbacks (after all we were representing them) and they weren't impressed and felt they didn't understand the complex English (most of the dialogues were taken from the book). But our English instructor thought otherwise and said the pronunciation and dialogue delivery were awful. We can't help it because we usually never converse in English and we believed it was best suited only for text books and exams. We re-wrote the dialogues to make it much simpler.

We were just one week away from the day of the competition and what followed is what I believe the hardest I've ever worked in my life. It should have been the same for my friends. We practiced and practiced for hours at school, ground, home. wherever we could get some privacy. Thanks to our class teacher and English teacher, they were very supportive. Finally the D-day came and everyone was wondering what 9-C had in store for them. Such was the expectation for us!

We didn't give much importance to our costumes since it was a simple play. It turned out to be a mistake. My stage-wife came in a dashing dress for the play. I said 'hey! We're supposed to be poor. Can't you wear something plain?'. After a lot of persuasion from the our class teacher she finally agreed to change it.

The play started and we started extremely well. Good dialogues, nice comedy and not-so boring screenplay - everything was going fine when one of my friends (co-actor?) decided to have some fun of his own. He forgot his lines and stood completely stunned at his own blunder. It wasn't even an important dialogue. All he had to say was 'I'm busy. Shall we talk about it later?'. He could have pretended that he hadn't forgot anything and I would have continued with my lines. Instead he just stared at the audiences as though he hadn't a clue why he was there. By now the crowd was becoming a bit noisy and started murmuring among themselves. I then blurted out something stupid like "I think we are busy. We'll talk afterwards" and completed the scene.

The play continued normally and I completed my final lines to a decent applause. But we were all completely down since we completely messed it up. With just an ordinary story, we had believed that our performance would get us the price. But it seemed a dream now. Of the six plays performed that day, two were completely awful and we were hoping for a third place. This was because a couple of spectators who joined us after the play felt that 9-B and 10-A plays were good (we didn't see either). We all moved to the corner of the auditorium deeply saddened and taking turns to scold the poor line-forgetter.

As usual, they announced the 3rd place first and it went to 9-B and the second to 10-A. And the first place to... I wouldn't have written this entire thing if it hadn't been us! Yes we won it and '9-C' was the last words that the audience could hear on that day because we started shouting like anything. We were jumping and the whole crowd turned back to look what was going on. Our class teacher joined us in the celebrations caring nothing about the angry looks from our principal or the head mistress.

It was one of my greatest days and one that I will remember for my lifetime.