When stories from the kitchen take centrestage

And for many of us, a kitchen is indeed a melting pot of emotions and various flavours. Keeping this in mind, Chennai’s very own theatre seeding organisation, Shraddha has come up with an interesting production called Nam Samayalarayil, revolving around the kitchen. The organisers behind the play open up about the concept behind it. “ 

Nam Samayalarayil is an anthology of four short plays — Nithya, Meenu Engira Meenatchi Ammal, The Haunted Kitchen and Suda Suda. The concept of developing a play revolving around the kitchen was suggested to us by veteran director Visu. We gave this idea to a few writers associated with Shraddha and asked them to develop it into a play. Much to our surprise, we received four interesting plays which had different perspectives,” says G. Krishnamurthy, one of the directors. 

He will be directing two plays — Meenu Engira Meenatchi Ammal and Suda Suda . “The first play is about a woman’s challenges to make a perfect ‘special’ dish for her friend and how an old lady helps her succeed. Suda Suda revolves around an interesting conversation between a grandfather and a granddaughter, with the latter questioning the stereotyping of certain jobs. When a family buys a coffeemaker with a tagline — a woman’s best friend, the youngest member, starts questioning the tagline and asks her grandfather why it is only her mother’s duty to cook food? This will be an interesting play to watch,” shares Krishnamurthy. 

A prominent member of Shraddha, Shivaji Chaturvedi, who also doubles up as the producer talks about the other two plays — Nithya and The Haunted Kitchen. “Nithya exhibits the daily morning chaos that is actually attached to all nuclear family nowadays. It commences when the parents and their two school going kids wake up late in the morning and how they try to cope up the time lag with all the hurry especially the kitchen daily chores. The Haunted Kitchen is a hilarious take on how a woman utilises an eerie situation in a kitchen and thereby escapes from the kitchen duties,” he says. 

Shivaji also explains the vision of Shraddha. “Our aim is to create a vibrant and sustainable theatre culture from Chennai. Over the past seven years, our theatre movement has helped seed and present many new subjects to the theatre-going audience. We have traversed varied genres — from corruption in cricket to period dramas on Manickavasagar and Ramanujar to plays for children to science fiction,” he says.