What goes on in the wings and control booths rarely earns the same recognition as the actors, director and the playwright. And many times, these unsung heroes of ours, who go by code names of Stage Manager, Prop Designer, Make-Up Artist or Crew, apart from doing their regular jobs, pull off something very special which audience are completely unaware of. Friday, opening night of Kanyadaan was one of those days.
While we actors were basking in the limelight of our Friday performance, we all knew the show wouldn’t have been the same without our props coordinator’s ‘acting’ that day. You read it right, our prop coordinator’s acting! After Thursday’s preview show, we unfortunately had to dismantle our set and wrap up the props, because the theater had a booking for another show before ours. And somewhere in midst of all this, a prop knife got misplaced. We realized it when we were arranging props on the table just before the show. The house is open, people are in, just 20 minutes from the show, and we are missing an important prop. Agastya, our director was not comfortable letting me go on stage with a real (even if blunt) knife in my pocket – to avoid the slightest chance of injury. We started looking for a plan B, tried to find things that could pass for a knife. I started cleaning a blade meant for smearing paint or something and was experimenting sitting, standing and walking with it in my pocket.
And at that time, Ritika, our prop’s coordinator decided to take responsibility of salvaging the situation. She asked us to focus on the show and immediately left the theater in hunt of a blunt/toy knife. We had lost all hopes that she can get us something which Agastya would let me use, particularly because it was almost 8 PM and most shops had closed by then. She hopped from store to store, from Target to Toys-r-us, testing out really any store open at that time to find potentially anything that could serve as a replacement. On top, the battery of her phone had died, so she could not really look for prop/costume shops around her. Finally, she found a shop, which was as expected closed, but now began the real acting. She managed to find the owner and jump started the actress within her, to plead how badly we needed a knife. Her performance was clearly convincing enough as the owner agreed to that this was a worthy cause and opened the shop. And lo! we saw her returning back well in time before the knife scene, with not just a possible replacement, but exactly the same knife that we had lost, and I had been using in all the rehearsals – completely removing the element of using an unfamiliar prop.
The show went off extremely well, people came and congratulated us for our performances but we all knew who was the star performer of the day!!!
