CHANDIGARH - She's for Women

CHANDIGARH TIMES
Wednesday, 9 October 2002 

"WHENEVER you try to be different, whenever your try to do something new, you whave to face a challenge," admits Lushin Dubey, famous theatre director and actress who is known for her contributions to Hindi and English theatre, apart from her concerted effort of promoting children's theatre. Particularly when one attempts to produce a fusion between a story from Rajasthan (Vijaydan Detha's Nyari Nyari Maryada) and a French Nobel Laureate's play (Dario Fo's Media), to produce "Untitled", a solo theatre performance the challenge becomes all the more pronounced.

It all began when Lushin watched " Beneath The Waves," a programme made by a lady corespondent of BBC who hid camera and herself behind a burqua to record the unspeakable cruelty of Taliban regime, where women where the target of all kinds of unimaginable tortune. Lushin hand just experience the trauma of being airborne in the US when the tragedy was striking the twin towers on September 11. The great courage of the correspondent inspired her to voice her concern about the vulnerability of women in all kinds of situations after watching this programme. "I wanted to speak for women, a kind of an ode to womanhood and their courage, so we organised workshops and started looking for the right script, the situations was like, I wanted to bake a cake but the ingredients were missing," says Lushin.

It was then that she came across a story by Vijaydan Detha 'Nyari Nyari Maryada' and incorporated Dario Fo's 'Medea' into it tos hape the script suited for a solo performance. Lushin enacts all the roles in this play with the help of few puppets of Dadi Pudumjee. Why tow stories form two different cultures? "These issues are universal when I do this play the rural and the rich urbanite, both identify with the tale. " She says, and adds to clarify, " I am not doing something with aggressive feminism, I have nothing against men in this play, but I talk about a system which marginalises women of all classes and backgrounds, and what women have made out of themselves out of these systems where their vulnerability is exploited in one way of the other." Should we expect this issue based theatre also to be entertaining? "Watch it" is all she says. Lushin was addressing a preview session of "Untitled' presented by Oorga at Tagore theatre on October 10 at 6.30 pm. Entry is strictly on donor cards.