STAGE HAS WINGS!!

Just like the bird, the stage too has "wings". A well-staged play can take you to world of imagination where you willingly suspend your disbelief. Say, on a stage there is no door through which you enter the room, yet when you enter the acting space you can always make the audience believe that you have entered a room. If it's a typically Bengali household, you open your shoes at the "wing" and enter barefoot, place the umbrella in the corner. It's clear to the audience that you have entered the house and before entering, you were outside.
The detailed setting of the stage has its charm. But simple setting has its own magic as well. One of the directors I have worked with is a master craftsman in a creating simplistic set. In Classics such as Syed Huq's “Nurol Deen er Shara Jibon”, all that my director had made in terms of stage design was a sloping platform what you call a "dhal" in Bangla. On this sloped platform Nuroldeen gave his crying call to rebel, the British Collector and his juniors drew out strategies to put them down and Ambiya cried for her rebel husband (Nurol) who had gone off to fight the British. No other piece of furniture or installation was required to make the audience believe that it was the lawn of the house of the British lieutenant and in the next scene it was the battleground of the peasant leader Nuroldeen.
Then I saw a Manoj Mitra play directed by this same director. There were just two platforms which created a space to act on. At the end, with one untying of the knot, the painted backdrop comes down to indicate the tragic fall of the travelling "theter" (as one would pronounce in the early days of 20th century).
Again coming back to Syed Shamsul Huq's “Khatta Tamasha”, the setting of the famine was a tattered red sari hanging from a suggestion of a side of a "berar baree"; thatched house. On his seventieth birthday of Aly Zaker, his designer Bipasha Hayat spoke of the liberty she was given to make this very simplistic set.
 When you watch a play in Broadway or off Broadway or off off Broadway however, you will usually see the magic of good acting with the magic of a finely constructed set. People are starry eyed to see the helicopter land on the stage in Le Saigon.
In Bangladesh, the Acting has to carry all. In the empty stage of “Khona” or “Mallam Iliya” by Bottola or the empty stage of “Dhaboman” by Dhaka Theatre, or the empty space of “Mohajoner Nao” by Shubochon, the empty stage plays magic on the audience wherein good direction and superb acting sweeps the audience off its feet and they willingly suspend disbelief - the empty stage therefore becomes a palace, or a river.
But gone are the days when Abul Hayat, Asaduzzaman Noor, Humayun Faridi, Ferdausi Majumdar, Aly Zaker or Khaled Khan set their foot on stage. In the present scenario, physical acting has taken the place of good acting. However, that is a different debate for another day.
Coming back to "wings”. A  Stage does have "wings". They are not the feathered wings like the birds have. Wings of a stage are black curtains or framed black cloth, put slantingly on the two sides of a stage. It masks the actor repeating his/ her lines or whispers her last minute "doa" or does "pronam" to the stage before he/ she enters the world of Magic!
Like I said, just as birds, stages too, have wings!!

The writer is Actor, Director & Activist