Adaptation: A bickering couple and a rekindled romance, all under one roof

Westminster presents an adaptation of Neil Simon’s play ‘Barefoot in the Park’.

ISLAMABAD:

A month of rehearsal and practice paid off as the Westminster College’s Dramatics Society interpretation of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” opened strong here on Friday night.  

The play’s director Salma Mir, in addition to Usama Qazis’s guidance is perhaps the only experienced input in the production. Iman Ommaya plays the female lead, Corrie Bratter, Ayesha Iftikhar plays Ethal Banks, Ameerdad Khan plays Paul and Amir Arif Rao Victor Valesco.

The creative director of the society Raheel Khan said, “Students are realising that along with good grades extracurricular activities like theatre are important to give you an edge in the application process.”

The play revolves around two newly weds, Corrie and Paul, in New York during the 60s. Therefore, at times the pervasiveness of American references and lifestyle in the play seemed to elude the audience and the actors, at times magnified by shortcomings of phonetics and annunciation.

However, despite the different cultural setting the play’s larger themes of love in the face of irreconcilable differences, opposites attracting, lack of monetary funds and the inevitably of aging and death resounded completely with the audience.

Corrie and Victor Valesco (the couple’s neighbour), and Mrs Banks (Corrie’s mother) and Paul’s characters serve as doppelgangers to each other; while Corrie and Valesco are eager to drink, dance and sing the night away, Mrs Banks complains about headaches and wants to call it a night.

This contrast in personalities is used to drive home the point that despite their differences there is genuine love and affection between both the couples.

The play, is in essence a romantic comedy paralleling the ecstasy and perils of young love with the second awakening of a rekindling romance depicted by the characters of Victor Valesco (Amir Arif Rao) and Mrs Ethal Banks.

The chemistry between all the characters was quite believable, in particularly Khan as Paul was very convincing in his role of a ‘stuffed shirt’ to the extent that one forgets that he is putting on an act. Khan successfully polarised Paul’s character by employing a child like demeanour for her character.

Rao and Iftikhar also develop on-stage chemistry but in this instance they do so by convincing the audience how much the two characters despise each other, until the very end when they start to see eye-to-eye. The doppelganger pairings had a spark to them as well and were accentuated when the opposite pairing scenes took place.  This counter duality underlining the play gave more weight to the comedic value as well as the actors.

Khan said that the society plans to perform an Urdu play next year, as they are on the decline and resound with the audience in a way that cannot always be achieved with English adaptations.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 20^th, 2011.