Read, Re-enact, Repeat

What 3D is to cinema, play reading is to theatre. When you watch a play, you look at it from the outside. But when you read a play, you become the play," reasons Cecil Thounaojam, cofounder of Nouveau Art play reading group of dramebaaz – aficionados of theatre, their idea of unwinding on a Sunday is reading out loud award-winning English plays once a month. Any reading gathers between 10 to 35 members from varied backgrounds with a common interest in English literature. Since 2013, they've read about 47 plays in Mumbai's coffee-shops, art galleries, open-air amphitheatre and even the promenande.

Thirty-year-old Thounaojam, and the core group – Noel Gomes, Noella D'Souza and Jay Jha were colleagues at a content writing firm. Aligned interests in art, theatre and literature culminated into reading Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie one weekend.

"The characters and their dialogues, stayed on our minds even after we returned to work on Monday. We realised there must be people like us, not professionally involved but with a keen interest in the arts," recounts thirty-five-year-old Gomes. When strangers showed up for the first public play reading – another Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire – they were gung ho to keep the drama ignited.

Drama is what the attendees get indeed. Despite the routine in execution – a brief about the plot and characters before every play, each play has its dose of quirks, "We never tell people how to read the dialogues. So they add their own drama. For instance, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman has characters who speak from two different rooms. We had only one room to perform. This one dramebaaz took a chair and sat facing a corner and another, following his suit, took to another corner," recounts Gomes.

Gomes, digital head at an IT firm, adds his own twists to maintain a peppy vibe – only men essaying Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, same-sex couples instead of the original heterosexual protagonists in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, donning animal masks for George Orwell's Animal Farm, releasing white balloons to condole the death of Andre from AIDS in Terrence McNally's Andre's Mother, using glove puppets to mouth dialogues in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, replicating the statues and cityscape in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, attempting Joseph Stein's musical Fiddler on the Roof. And even reading under mobile phone flashlights at Carter's promenade. "This cafe miscalculated the size of our group and kicked us out. But our enthusiastic dramebaaz, ensured 'the show must go on' and readily settled for Carter's." says Gomes.

Of late, the group has also put up performances, their latest – Breaking the Fourth Wall – commemorating Shakespeare's birthday month, 12 dramebaaz portraying Macbeth, Hamlet, Lorenzo etc, reading their parts in archaic as well as contemporary English: with someone as Shakespeare playing sutradhar in medieval European garb to a ticketed crowd. "We made Shakespeare do what Kevin Spacey did in House of Cards and Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool. Talk to the fourth wall, the audience."

Amongst the actors was 45-year-old reservist Mahesh Paranjpe who has attended over 10-12 readings despite living in far away Thane and overcame his stage fright to play Shylock and Hamlet. "Despite having five rehearsals, I took the script with me everywhere, so even with a little time, I would practice."

For Brinda Poojary playing Romeo was cakewalk after enacting Betty in David Ives' Sure Thing. "I took a month to memorise the dialogues and had to change my expression every time the bell rang to indicate a different situation." The 28-year-old embryologist confesses, "Even if they read in a shanty, I'll show up because I like the people and the plays they select."

"In this world where people say, 'be yourself', we're out to say, once in a while, it's better to be someone else. Our members live their dialogues long after the play is over. The one who played Macbeth kept saying do I see a dagger there? do I see a coffee cup there?" chuckles Gomes.

For updates on the next reading, check: https://www.facebook.com/NouveauArtGroup