Shakespeare once said that all the world's a stage. If that is true, why build an actual, yet temporary stage? Especially, at a time when people are supposed to maintain a distance from each other and when the audience cannot come together to watch a play.
With Zoomed In, none of that will matter. As the name suggests, the show, spread over two days will feature five plays, where the performers are spread across different parts of the world, will be done completely on Zoom. The genres of all these plays are quite different from each other. An average of four actors will be present on 'stage' at any given point of time, says its writer and director Prahaban Chakraborty.
Prabahan, who holds a PhD from Bengaluru's National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) is currently pursuing his post-doctoral research in France. "I am holding this show through StageCraft, a theatre collective that I co-founded in NCBS. I am a theatre enthusiast, but there isn't much scope for it for me here, because I do not speak much French. So, I put out an audition call and set up this play," he says. The group has been practising for over two months now.
Even though there is no actual stage, Prabahan says that a lot of backstage and production work went into the making of this production. "A lot of our actors even modified their living spaces to match the play's setup. We also did a lot of online shopping to ensure that everyone had the right costumes," he says. He also says that the team had explored a lot of Zoom's features to ensure sound coordination and to ensure the experience is solid.
