"Dada ek good news aahe" - Marathi play staged in Navi Mumbai (Panvel) on 17.7.2022

"I want to give birth to my child" 

"I want to give birth to my child" - if a woman states, who on the earth has power to stop her? Nobody even not her most loveable and only family person the elder brother can. May she be merely a college girl or even when she is still unmarried. The point is not whether the pregnancy hither is recommendable or not the point is whether a woman has a right over her womb or not. "Dada ek good news aahe" raises this most pertinent social issue in perfectly an emphatic manner. Namita, a college girl of just 18 is living with her elder brother Vineet in a metro city who is a brilliant commerce student and is on the verge of completion of his CFA course.  The brother-sister bond is awesome and both respect each other.  As they come from a conservative family, the free ambience of city allows them to make friendship with others without any regard to gender. One day, Namita reveals before her brother that she has tested positive in the pregnancy test. Vineet is furious and really in a fix. He does not know how to deal with it. He asks her who is responsible for her pregnancy. She says there is a boy in the college who is in love with her.

Vineet finds himself it the midst of a maelstrom. He pleads to his sister for abortion  but she denies. Then he begs to his sister's lover to marry the pregnant girlfriend, but the boy shows his inability to do so.  After all, they all belong to a conservative middle-class family. What people will say? How will they show their face in the society? 

But with their grit and high level of understanding the duo of brother-sister is able to come out of the mess in an unexpected manner but with a happy note. This was never an easy move and it demanded a big sacrifice. As the staging of this play is continued till date so I am not going to divulge more on the script. 

The script is vivid and astonishingly realistic. This is a real-life situation and thanks to the guts of the writer it is presented actually in that way only. There is absolutely not an iota of casualness or preaching mentality that you could trace. The director has done his work aptly and the actors lived up to his expectations. It seems that it might have been originally thought to be comedy show which turned into an intense serious play. The magic is that the thread of comedy has not given way to the sobriety of the subject. Both mode of comedy and seriousness travels in tandem so that an extremely grave issue is communicated without being burdened. So you learn a very difficult lesson while just getting entertained. The set-design was pragmatic in the sense that it showed all the upstairs, the hall, kitchen, drawing room all at a time. The focused light-management could have added more value to the presentation                                                                                The actor playing Vineet has stolen the show. The height of the brother's embarrassment seeing an untimely pregnant sister was genuinely reflected in his nervous but trying-to-nerve-up body-language and accent.  The unshaken stance of Namita was quite impressive. Namita's lover's facial expression and body-postures were quite in-tune in keeping the comedy alive and the girlfriend of Vineet lived her character with adequate responsibility.

The play was presented by Sonak Production and it's Priya Bapat. It was directed by Adwait Dadarkar and the writer is Kalyani Patare. Those who acted were Umesh Kamat, Arti More, Ashutosh Gokhale and Mruga Bodas. 
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Article by - Hemant Das 'Him'
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