The good woman

Kiyomi Mehta rehearses for the play at a studio in Vile Parle. Pics/Sameer Markande

Shraddha is an elite Mumbai homemaker, who has to have the music on in every room of her luxuriously furnished apartment, except in the bedroom, where the TV is always blaring. It keeps her company, she says, as she goes about her day taking care of her perverted bhaisaab and a peeing-pooping baby, occasionally tackling a harassing anonymous caller, a Peeping Tom for a neighbour, and an unrelenting ex-lover. And of course, there's Adi, her husband, her "jaan", who's so doting that he doesn't let her out of home, and whose idea of love is to beat her up. Yes, she's not extraordinary; in fact, we all probably know of a Shraddha - calm, chatty, compromising, and abused. That's possibly why her story needs to be told over and over again, till there comes a day when it's finally redundant, feels theatre director Savitri Medhatul, who's set to do just that in her upcoming play, A Woman Alone.

Savitri Medhatul and her team look on

Produced by Kali Billi Productions of Sangeet Bari fame, the piece has been adapted by Medhatul and actor Kiyomi Mehta, who plays Shraddha. Written in the '90s by the husband-wife duo of Nobel laureate Dario Fo and Franca Rame, two powerful political Italian theatre-makers, the monologue assumes the form of a conversation between the protagonist and her neighbours, the audience. When we arrive at their rehearsal space - an oasis of calm in the otherwise bustling Vile Parle station area - Medhatul reveals to us that the script landed on her lap, thanks to veteran theatre critic Shanta Gokhale, who gave it to her three years ago. She finally picked it up during the lockdown, a time marked not just by an engulfing loneliness similar to the protagonist's, but also rising cases of domestic abuse, which she's a victim of.

Kiyomi Mehta

While Shah and Medhatul have largely remained true to the original play, they've chosen to locate Shraddha in an urban, well-to-do household as opposed to the lower-income-group protagonist in Fo and Rame's version. "The reason is that in India, it's a stereotype that these sorts of things only happen to women from the lower rung," Medhatul notes, adding that they tried to challenge the image of a victim vis-à-vis the casting, too. "It's easy to imagine someone with a smaller physique as a victim. Casting Mehta, who's tall and broad, was a conscious, visual choice," she adds.

With a dash of dark humour and wit, Mehta on her part slips into Shraddha's shoes effortlessly, as a lonely, talkative wife unravelling her secrets while knitting, dusting and tending to her chores. Clad in a colourful kaftan, hair pulled up in a curler and a sheet mask on her face, the actor reveals that that's exactly how the play started as she and Medhatul would meet between home chores on Zoom to discuss the script. Voicing Shraddha's exhausting inner turmoil has taught her empathy, she says. "I kept thinking of my building sweeper who'd beat his wife. I started looking at relationships differently. It was a lot of unlearning of years of patriarchal conditioning," adds the actor, moments before leaving us squirming in our seat and questioning our own conditioning with her performance. The play, Medhatul concludes, is not about giving answers. "It's about taking a re-look at ourselves and questioning things we often take
for granted."

On March 19, 6 pm and 8.30 pm
At Prithvi Theatre, 20 Janki Kutir, Juhu Church Road.
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Cost: Rs 300