Review: Dancing On Glass
The title of the play alludes to one of two things. One is the disorientation one feels when walking on glass, say, in a tall building – the sensation of looking down and feeling like you’re walking on air. The other is of course, stepping on glass, broken glass that is, and getting hurt. Now, imagine dancing on glass in both the scenarios, moving at an ever so fast pace. You’re either bound to faint and collapse or get seriously injured.
Delirium and injury, these are the two things that usually govern the laws of youth, especially those of young people in love, and ‘Dancing on Glass’ will show you those laws in action. The play follows the story of two people, a quirky software engineer and a frustrated BPO employee. With these two cultural references in mind, it shouldn’t be hard for any Indian urban citizen to deduce that the play is set in Bangalore, or rather Bengaluru as it is now known. The play is a vignette into the lives of these two particular individuals whose being is governed by the corporate world. Their timings, their frustrations, their health problems, their sleeping patterns, their habits, their leisure activities, its all there.
The story hits the ground running. The girl’s boyfriend dies in a car crash, his room mate and friend tries to console her only to realize that she isn’t mourning his loss. He finds her slightly odd, she finds him sweet and reserved, slightly offbeat. They go through their moments of confusion, resentment and happiness and what accompanies all this is laughter galore. Even though the dialogues expose strong emotions, they happen to be crafted in such a way that each one delivers a punch of dark humor, you cant help smile, giggle, chuckle and laugh out loud in spite of yourself. Boy and girl eventually fall in love, though love, as easy as it seems to fall into, is hard to sustain. Eventually the characters find themselves questioning what it is they truly want, and it is through this questioning that the characters travel full cycle, back to the beginning, back to the death of a person they once knew.
The sets have been imagined well. A pair of stairwells that lead up, from either side, to a chair. The chair rests upon a glass column, about twenty feet tall. The chair itself is bathed in yellow light and the rest in a midnight blue, while the two beds at the bottom occupy the spotlights. At first glance, it provides a feeling of something from a space-age movie, but upon closer scrutiny, one realizes it captures the essence of what is happening. Two sides that lead up to one final realization, rested on a delicate piece of glass that can shatter at any moment. It probably already has and the play is the dance of two people, dancing on glass.
