Amateur talent

I have been reading VinodG’s stirring account of his performance as an extra in the lowest budget production in the history of filmmaking. It made me rue the fact that the academy does not have any award for “outstanding achievement as an extra” in movies made for under $ 20. I do hope however that all the fame and adulation will be adequate compensation. Watch out for autograph seekers mate. While I was impressed by his account, I have to say that it pales in comparison to my own sensational debut in the “corporate culturals” play.

The “corporate culturals” was like every other night of entertainment by amateur talent and by that, I mean a bit of a disaster. On careful thought and analysis, I think this is because there is more amateur and less talent at these events. What is with these amateurs anyway? Why do Assistant Marketing Managers get excited by the words sing/ act/ dance? Does it not occur to them that if they had such talent they would not be toiling away as wage slaves? It would appear that people will do anything for a few minutes under the spotlight. Apparently, some of us need merely to hear the words extra in no budget production and we are present with our hair in a braid.

Coming back to my play, my little team of actors was the sort that takes its craft seriously and we were willing to go that extra length to do it right. We took off from work for two whole days to rehearse. But things got a bit messy because we kept altering the script every single time we rehearsed until finally no one had a clue as to what was going on. We decided we would just get up there and “manage”. Which is all very well, except that all the humour derives from wordplay and therefore if the words in the dialogue were even slightly mixed, the punchline would not make any sense. There was a few goof ups when actor A said some thing that was spirit of the dialogue but not the exact one and actor B whose punchline now made no sense stood there giving him a look that said “ dei, nee velila vaa da”.

Luckily, nothing went wrong with my scene. All my fears that I would forget my lines or trip over my sari and fall or that the sari would fall off were completely unfounded. It is another thing altogether that my scene was not at all funny to start with. In fact, it did not even make any sense to me. (But, to be fair to the playwright, the play was quite funny in parts, it is just that I did not get any of those parts). Anyway, I made the best of it and I was quite thrilled. I have to say a little bit here about the audience. And when I say audience I mean ugly mob of paper rocket throwing booers and jeerers prone to violence. These guys were unbelievable. It is one thing to jeer a bad performer; but they were booing even perfectly fine pieces of entertainment. We did extract a few laughs (and just one missile) from them and on the whole , I think that it was a job well done.