HYDERABAD: The fourth edition of Samahaara Comedy Night took place at Lamakaan last weekend. Spread over nearly an hour-and-a-half, the evening was laced with four short plays and two stand-up comedy shows, where founders Ratna Shekhar Reddy and Anjali Parvati Koda, chose four American writers for the comedies.
Two plays of the famous American playwright, Jonathan Rand, Check Please and Drugs are not Bad, was chosen along with one play each of Neil Simon and Nick Zagone, called Surgery and Behind the Bar respectively.
In an interaction after the event was over, Reddy admitted that there were no short plays available in other Indian languages as it was just catching up as a genre. With his workshop members drawn from various ethnic backgrounds, English was the link which bound them and their enthusiasm to perform in a play.
As the proceedings began, the effort put in by the cast to make their performances stand out and look professional showed very well as the audience was hooked to the stage right from the start. A tribute to the organisers is that their effort in enmeshing the potential of both debutantes and experienced actors was seamless.
Check Please was a typically sitcomish play when two people - having made wrong choices for blind dates - finally strike it right, almost. The mismatched pairs and their antics provided a lot of scope for steady laughter from the crowd.
Drugs are not Bad was a different take on parenting where the mother and father duo feign shock at the straight-forward nature of their son who seems more studious than they expect him to be. Ultimately, it ends up in a manner which shows them being pleased that their kid stuck to the straight and narrow and came up trumps instead of dissipating his life in pursuing vices.
Surgery was fundamentally slapstick when an intern begs a potential patient in a dental clinic to put an end to his misery by operating his affected tooth. The outcome is of course a foregone conclusion, with both trying to outdo the other and the disaster that is waiting to happen - a botch-up - occurs. The frantic limb movements and antics of the cast drew whoops of laughter and provided endless mirth to the young crowd.
Like the stand-up comedy acts, which were the run-of-the mill mimicry types with popular Hindi film stars panned mercilessly, the final act - Behind the Bar- was a tad low on interest levels, despite the star cast putting up a spirited show.