Woman to Woman

The play All About Women (an all-female starcast) is wowing Mumbai audiences with its housefull shows. Deepa Gahlot writes.

Men move over. On Mumbai stage, women are emerging on the top and more plays are being performed with themes revolving around the gender today.

In popular cinema, female-centric subjects are taboo, television presents a completely unrealistic and distorted picture of women’s lives, but once in a while theatre comes up with a play that holds up the mirror to what women think and how they relate to one another.

Croatian playwright Miro Gavran wrote All About Women, which has been adapted with Indian characters in a Mumbai setting by
Purva Naresh, produced by Akarsh Khurana and directed by Hidayat Sami.

It has an all-woman cast — men prance in to make quick set changes in the semi-dark — and features some of the most gifted actresses in Mumbai today — Ratnabali Bhattacharjee, Mryunmayee Lagoo, Prerna Chawla, Nimrat Kaur, Tejaswini Kolhapure, Vandana Prabhu, Mallaika Shenoy and Shivani Tanksale.

They play multiple parts.. one of the stories is set in a kindergarten school.. and one in an old folks’ home, with several kinds of relationships and emotions explored in between the two extreme stages of life — friendship, sisterhood, love, rivalry, possessiveness, forgiveness and heartbreak.