Dr. Mohan Agashe is regarded as one of the best character actors of Indian stage and screen. Currently he is visiting USA to direct a play for Epic Actor’s Workshop at the Eighth South Asian Theatre Festival to be held at the Crossroads Theatre in New Brusnwick New Jersey (see calendar on the side bar). I grabbed this opportunity to invite him at our EBC Drama Club to share with us his experience in Theatre and Film. He talks about his childhood days, his experience with Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghasiram Kotwal, about Satyajit Ray, Utpal Dutt, Film and Television Institute of India and many other things. Click the player below to listen to this exciting conversation with Dr. Mohan Agashe.
New Jersey has many things to be proud of – the Jersey shores, the Atlantic City Boardwalk, the Meadowlands, the Pine Barrens – the list is quite long. Now you can add to that list, the South Asian Theatre Festival organized by Epic Actors Workshop, a theatre and performing arts organization of New Jersey. Over the last seven years, South Asian Theatre Festival of New Jersey has established itself as an unique event that we all look forward to. A festival dedicated to celebrate South Asian theatre is not a common occurrence in this part of the world. Showcasing the rich and diverse theatre of South Asia to the greater American audience is no small feat. It requires vision, a great deal of motivation, and a huge amount of resources, for which the host organization Epic Actors Workshop and its leader Dr. Dipan Ray deserves a huge applause from us all theatre lovers. This year Epic Actors Workshop celebrates it’s twenty fifth anniversary by hosting the eighth South Asian Theatre festival at the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick New Jersey on Sept 27th, 28th and 29th with a gala presentation of eight plays. Continue reading →
Anton Chekov has been on of the most celebrated playwrights and short story writers of the modern times. Konstantin Stanislavsky and his Moscow Art Theatre brought Chekov in front of the western audience at a time when Chekov was almost about to give up writing plays. Four of his most famous plays, “The Seagull”, “Uncle Vanya”, “Three Sisters” and “Cherry Orchard”, were all produced and staged by Moscow Art Theatre. Since then Chekov’s plays have been performed all around the world in multiple languages. In Kolkata, Chekov was made popular by the famous theater group “Nandikar”, and more specifically by Ajitesh Bandopadhyay. “Swan Song”, one of Chekov’s popular plays, is a touching portrayal of a sixty eight year old stage actor who laments the loss of his youthful days and the apathy of his audience. Swan Song [1887] was one of his early plays featuring two characters: Vasili Svietlovidoff, a 68 year old comic actor and Nikita Ivanich, who is an even older man, the theater’s prompter. Following a benefit evening in his honor, unbeknownst to everyone, the comic actor Svetlovidov falls asleep in a drunken blur. When he awakens, the theater is dark and empty. He falls quickly into saddened monologue..
The play was also adapted by Ajitesh Bandopadhyay in Bengali as “Nana Ranger Din” and there is hardly any actor who hasn’t attempted this piece in his life. Couple of weeks ago, we did a broadcast of “The Swan Song” on EBC Radio on our EBC Drama Club show. The performers include Dwaipan Mukherjee as Nikita the prompter, and myself as Vasili the actor. The translation is by Marian Fell. Enjoy.
A Bengali friend asked rhetorically “Why do you think quite a few, a significant proportion at that, of our daughters are marrying outside the Bengali community and indeed majority of them preferring white Americans?” He thought he had an answer too, “They have concluded, observing their Bengali fathers I think that the Bengali men are opinionated, argumentative, obstinate, dominating and positively not romantic.”
Well that may be a strong sweeping statement, not based on any poll data or census study; but searching for causality, it is possibly safe bet to make an intuitive conjecture on the subject. I could see through the point my friend was trying to make. Our children have the luxury of wider perspective and many options, as opposed to the situation in our left behind homeland. And they do compare and choose. Continue reading →
[youtube http://youtu.be/u85DqflMe2U] Few years ago, we at ECTA staged a two person play – “Satyameva”. The play was first staged in Kolkata (at the Sujata Sadan) with Indranil Mukherjee and Sankar Ghoshal performing the two roles and I was the director. The play was very well received by the audience and later on Ashoke Mukhopadhyay (who was in the audience in one of the shows), director of the well known group Theater Workshop picked up the play and staged it (renamed as Jodiyo Galpo) on a regular basis with himself as the director and actor along with Krishnagati Mukherjee as his co-star. The play was revived again in New Jersey by ECTA and this time Indranil Mukherjee directed the play with Pinaki Datta and me as his cast. The play was staged in New Jersey, Columbus Ohio, Los Angeles California and San Francisco California. The play was also translated and staged in Marathi in New Jersey by Sharad Sathe and his team. Satinath Mukhopadyay, the famous radio artiste, presented this play on his radio show “Aschhe Se Aaschhe”. Still many people have missed this play on stage and requested us to share the video. I strongly believe that a video recording can never offer the same experience as that of a live performance. But to meet the demand of our audience, we are releasing a complete video recording of one of the New Jersey stagings of “Satyameva…” Also, please be reminded that this recording was done using a single camera without any editing or enhancements and hence the video and audio quality is far from perfect. Continue reading →
This is the other Bengali convention I am writing about. Not many know that it exists, but it has lived for last fifteen years, hail and hearty.
The event is organized by Mid America Bengali Association (MABA), a loosely held central body of many regional Bengali clubs from Louisville, Chicago, Birmingham, Atlanta among other cities. No one owns a franchise and it is made obvious by the apparent absence of claims of ownership by the organizing leaders of the convention. Continue reading →
It is well known that Bengalis have a weakness for literary magazines. Although I am not sure how much of this weakness can be attributed to their thirst for literature versus their thirst to see their name in print, but I am quite sure that if someone accounted for the huge number of Bengali magazines that are published around the world, the number would surely find a spot in the Guinness book of world records. There hardly exists any Bengali who has not been involved with the publication of a magazine in their lifetime. These magazines, also known as little magazines, often serve as the launching pad for many a literary stalwart. They challenge the establishment of big publishing houses and their glossy publications and offer their readers an alternative to the beaten path. They represent the dreams and aspirations of the Bengali youth. Unfortunately, most of these magazines are short lived and they whither away after few issues. In this country too, I have come across many such Bengali magazines which offered the readers a taste of their culture in print or in electronic form. Unfortunately they too did not last long. The primary reasons for their untimely death are lack of funds, lack of focus and lack of business acumen.
Recently another Bengali magazine has surfaced from Ohio, named Du-Kool, which roughly translates to, “two banks” of a river. Continue reading →
North America Bengali Conferences (NABC) have started to develop the same look and feel irrespective of where it is held. This year, the MTCC convention center in Toronto Canada looked no different than the Baltimore Convention Center of 2011 or the Atlantic City Convention center of 2010. Although this year the organizers have cut down on the decor part significantly, the stages are not like the dazzling spectacles of the previous years, and you can hardly see cut outs, paintings and signs strewn around the place. But as far as the pandemonium goes, the feel was exactly the same. Continue reading →
Often I receive requests from many of my friends to give them an opportunity to watch some of my plays which they had missed. Repeat performances of our plays happen few and far between, hence many a times, a missed show implies a missed opportunity. I have never liked watching plays on video screen, especially when it is captured from stage using a single stationary camera in an auto mode. Hence I have always been reluctant to share our show video archives with my friends. Theatre is something that is enjoyed best in a live theater setting, along with the other viewers. It is a community event. However, recently I had to succumb to the demands of my friends and released the video of our play “Rajar Chithi” on YouTube, and here they are in two parts. The play was staged earlier in 2011 in celebration of Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th Birth Anniversary and I have written earlier about it in a previous post. So if you have missed the show, here is your chance to get a glimpse of the production. Just a note of caution: The play will demand your attention as it is a long one (approx duration 1hr 50mins).
Last Saturday (June 15th, 2013) at our EBC Drama Club show, we had three very distinguished representatives from three different New Jersey Community Theatre organizations as our guests. Patrick Starega from the NJACT (Perry Award) organization representing its member theatres (more than 150), Lluana Jones from Villager’s Theatre (Somerset), and Rich Monteiro from Edison Valley Playhouse (Edison). The discussion started off with a recent article from Huffington Post by Howard Sherman titled “Theater the Theater Community Disdains!” I asked, why is it that such a negative attitude exists amongst the theater community? And the discussion rolled on, from the objectives of community theatre to the role it plays in our community, to the sensitive issues of ethnicity and diversity in community theatre, the variety and originality of content, and the overall quality of production and talent. Listen to this exciting discussion in the podcast below and join the community theatre movement that is thriving in New Jersey all around us.
