JAM Lays Bare the Gendered Control In Seemingly Liberal Households

Mumbai’s prestigious Prithvi Theatre Festival, held in November each year, has a line-up of star-studded plays on the main stage. Prithvi House, a small rehearsal space with a seating capacity of not more than 50, becomes the seat of experimentation with Prithvi Fringe. This year, Golpo Productions, with director Bhavya Rampal at the helm, presented JAM, a play by Annie Zaidi. 

A South Asia region winner of BBC’s International Playwriting Competition in 2011, JAM tells the story of two close friends who meet after a 10-year hiatus. Surekha (Anya Ghai) and Bina (Sharodiya Chowdhury) went to college together in Darjeeling and are now stuck in a traffic jam on the streets of Mumbai. There’s the incessant honking, the radio blaring inside, and the chatter of these women trying to get each other up to speed on their lives.

Golpo Productions’ JAM remains true to Zaidi’s powerful radio play depicting two women grappling with the patriarchy and their pasts. But the production hardly shifts the needle in terms of visual possibility. 

Released in the same year as Zaidi’s collection of short stories, The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl, JAM draws on the personal through a keen sense of the political. The story here is largely set in the confines of a car, with two central characters. In that, it is a departure from Zaidi’s oeuvre. 

The two actors, Ghai and Chowdhury, were last seen collaborating in Paper Planes, a play written and directed by the latter, with the former in a central role. While the Ghai comes with training in the Lecoq pedagogy, Chowdhury is an alumnus of Drama School Mumbai.  

Since it was originally written as a radio play, JAM has the perfect setting for several sonic elements inherent in the stage directions. It is firmly embedded in its milieu, with the radio songs marking the period.  A third character, RJ Taroq (Vishal Vardan Singh), appears frequently for comic relief. Taroq is energetic and silly, typical of radio jockeys of the early 2000s. The women can hear him; the audience can see him pop out of the wings and adjust his mic every time he is cued to make an entry. 

Though JAM as a text follows the linear narrative, its dramatic possibility is heightened by the back-and-forth recollections of its characters confined to a single space. It invokes shock, empathy, and sometimes, horror.  Surekha seemingly has it all—a job, a husband, and a car she recently bought with her own money. Bina, on the other hand, is the quintessential housewife with two kids and a home of her own. She lives in Pune and doesn’t drive. 

They talk about their families and choices with specific attention to Bina’s father, who interacts with Surekha often. The banter soon moves to the past, to the time in Darjeeling when a particularly traumatic incident occurred. Bina is reluctant to talk about it, while Surekha can’t seem to stay off the topic. The incident is hinted at but never fully detailed. 

Every time it comes up, there is a shift in tone, from casual and satirical to heavily dramatic, with an impending sense of doom. The conversations are frequently interrupted by Surekha’s agitated commentary about the traffic, the red lights, and then the aggression of a man in an SUV.

Director Rampal uses a few movement techniques to make the text come alive. There are small flourishes throughout: a pajama party is reimagined with a large garment to fit both actors, and the switching over of the wheel is achieved through synchronized rhythmic movement. These smart tricks give the otherwise verbose text the occasional visual break.

However, Golpo Productions’ JAM falters where Zaidi’s doesn’t. Despite a short runtime, the static visuals lead to the fatigue one would only experience in a longer, verbose play. The RJ’s repeated setup feels more gimmicky than it ought to be. As a result, his words are drowned out in superfluous laughter. One wishes that Taroq’s character was treated with the same lightness as Surekha and Bina. 

Additionally, despite the immense possibilities the premise offers, the sound design is lacking at best. It fails to produce the unease one experiences with the overlaid sounds of a Mumbai traffic jam amid the rain. As such, the makeshift steering is the only reminder of the space and situation. With its budgetary constraints, the production design is uninspired save for the “pajama.” JAM compromises the wonderful sonic capabilities of the text for near-static visuals and makes you wonder if a radio play should then remain as such. 

At the same time, Rampal honors the text and lets it shine through with his able actors. Especially notable is Anya Ghai as the graceful but unbridled Surekha. Her anger is palpable, and her choice of the staccato to convey the text’s gentle humor is admirable. It comes through every time the traffic signal resets to 120 after the countdown completes. 

Chowdhury isn’t far behind as the underconfident but entitled Bina. As the layers of the characters are peeled away, we begin to notice the grim reality of her domestic life. Bina’s perfect marriage and home is a veneer that hides a darker truth. Surekha may not have it all together, but navigates her life with practiced ease. She relies on Bina’s father for support, sharing her struggles with him. Ghai and Chowdhury display a range of emotions without as much as a scream.

JAM is a complex piece and, in no more than 30 pages, lays bare the gendered control in households. Through its characters, it dismantles the tropes of privilege to land each in the grey. Both educated women from seemingly liberal homes lack agency in their private lives. Zaidi knows that perfect characters rarely make for good drama. Apart from the two leads, we hear of and picture a few other characters: the father, the brother, the husbands, and a coveted scientist daughter-in-law. Their presence looms large despite the lack of dialogue.

The production of JAM brings about fatigue with uninspired staging and forced humor. While movement fills in some of the stasis, it leaves you to contend with the words alone. The use of the text without reimagining it, from the sonic to the visual, hardly justifies this change in the medium.  

Runaway Brides: A Farcical Take on Interfaith Marriages That Speaks Volumes In Its Little Rebellions

Writer-director Faezeh Jalali, who premiered her new play Runaway Brides at the Prithvi Theatre Festival 2024, loves a good farce. She also loves crafting characters that embrace eccentricities to make a point. She views the world around her with a touch of madness and makes these observational skills come alive through comedy. Runaway Brides has all the elements of her practice: a deeply political premise, physical theatre, humor, and a large cast. 

It is set in an Indian wedding. A South Indian Hindu boy, Rahul Shetty (Junaid Khan), is getting married to a North Indian Muslim girl, Amina Amin (Anoushka Zaveri). The two families could not be more different from each other. But it is a happy occasion, and they’ve come together to celebrate. The fathers (Jeevan Shetty and Prince Kanwal) are typical of their generation, with more uniting them than setting them apart. They want to take control of every situation and lighten the mood when things get serious. 

The two mothers (Nimisha Sirohi and Ojaswi Bhattarai) are college friends, tired of their husbands’ antics. The Muslim Nani (Prerana) is present at the wedding but makes her disapproval apparent. There is the unmarried Masi (Prashansa Sharm), the NRI aunt (Priyasha Sharma), and a Marathi right-wing character (Shubhankar Ekbote). 

The Masi is melancholic and wants a wedding of her own, the NRI aunt is loud, and pretentious, and wishes Rahul would marry within the community. The right-wing character, “Shaadi” (wedding) Cop, is against inter-religious marriages and takes every opportunity to make his views known. There is a rare progressive Pandit (Vikas Rawat) who does not care about who is getting married and wants to perform the wedding quickly. 

Song, dance, and some slapstick humor introduce these characters in the lead-up to a pivotal moment. But just as the pheras are about to begin, both mothers have gone missing. Who, at this point, will look for them? More importantly, where have the two women disappeared?

The second (of three) and longest act of Runaway Brides is spent in a hilarious search. Phones go missing, fathers get drunk, and Masi’s vulnerable albeit short monologue decries her fate of a groom who chose her, but ended up marrying her sister. Nani and Pandit have a moment, while the rest of the wedding party searches for the missing mothers. The Shaadi cop develops a strange chemistry with the NRI aunty. Together, they raise strong but whispered objections to this interreligious union, breaking into dance and accents in an over-the-top frenzy. 

Both families know what brings them together but can’t pass up any opportunity to one-up each other. This is made clear through many competitions, throughout Runaway Brides, including a rap about Hindu and Muslim names. Each party believes the other has only a handful of names for boys. They bring up other stereotypes associated with one another and play them out loud. It is an interesting ploy to address and render the stereotypes powerless. 

There are laughs and sometimes there is some discomfort, too. Some of it is ill-timed and begs for subtlety. Tender moments are interrupted by heightened accents and ‘Madarasi’ jibes for South Indian characters. 

Staged at a small, new theatre in Mumbai’s Aram Nagar, Rangshila, the cast uses every ounce of space available, from overhead balconies to the wings and the rows where the audience is seated. This approach initially works but soon gets repetitive. For instance, the fart jokes with the two women on the run, don’t seem to end. A scene about a lost phone, though suffused with humor, goes on for a tad too long. 

During this search, we realize the two women have run away together. They are in love and want to build a life away from familial duties. They are nervous and excited and can’t seem to get anything right as they run about to meet each other and escape from the hotel — the venue for the wedding. The hotel staff is roped in, and a long, filmy bathroom scene ensues. The groom joins in the action and there is much falling over and confusion.

All these laughter-filled setups lead to the ultimate farcical climax where everything that can go wrong, does. The Masi has a meltdown, family secrets are revealed, and the couple is no longer sure why they chose to get married. 

Despite the overused wedding premise, Runaway Brides has bursts of little rebellions that take some work to notice. The interreligious wedding, which may seem like the central plot, is quickly trumped by a lesbian relationship between middle-aged women. The couple seems in sync, and the interactions speak volumes about normalizing a marriage like this in a country up in arms about love jihad. 

The two runaway women have many practical considerations, but at no point are they driven back into patriarchal conditioning and mother’s guilt about prioritizing their children. They are their own people and have no qualms about their sexuality. They do not apologize to their husbands, yet their parting is amicable. 

The seemingly intolerant Nani, who isn’t pleased with the mixed wedding, has eyes for the Pandit. Here, she attempts to find things that unite them—even an ancient Nokia phone. Through this, Jalali comments on how conservatism is quickly abandoned when it comes to the self. The advanced age and the setting draw no attention to Nani’s shot at love. The ritualistic but open-minded Pandit encourages her advances, and by the end of the third act, the two seem like a couple. 

The two fathers, both stereotypical of their communities, rain misogynistic jokes on their families, but other characters rarely laugh at them. So, while the jokes find space, they are not normalized by others. The fathers, who are given to practicality, and hiding their emotions also get their moment towards the end of Runaway Brides. They share a drink and talk about their marriages, their secrets, and their yearnings. 

Some of the actors, despite being steeped in chaos, are memorable. Prerana is both menacing and mischievous as the Muslim Nani. Runaway Brides is well-rehearsed, and the cast has great comic timing, even when the jokes are overplayed and repetitive. Zaveri as Amina makes for an endearing, overwhelmed bride, albeit with agency. Khan brings life to the often silly, and sometimes profound Rahul. 

Runaway Brides is full of potential and glimpses of the play it could have been. You are left wishing it allowed you some slower, quiet moments to breathe, take in the details, and even laugh. Jokes come at you in quick succession, and leave you overstimulated throughout. 

A lot is being said and done throughout the play, and it’s easy to miss what remains unsaid. But it is in these little subversions that Runaway Brides shines.