Stage is the only place you can refute and reflect at the same time. You can be yourself. Well, nearly. Or you can choose to be someone else. You go out and be someone else and take that person home! That someone can rattle around your life, while you take yourself to bed safely. Bent under the burden of building this “character” is always at cross-purposes with your dreary image of self... The role you assume, the character you need to become pushes to win freedom for the stage. You want to say, “Look, I want only three hour visitations daily... for the rest of the time let me get back to my family, kids, husband, cake baking and recipe sharing life.” It is a given when you get to play a new role on stage you must slowly fall in love with it. Often, I want to shout there is no room for romance in my hard-as-concrete married life. Its set and solidified. But then the character comes to you with open arms and passion in her voice and I am lost.

So, there is this play, A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. A brilliant script. It has a character called Ruth who is a fiercely independent down-to-earth housewife whose dreams are constantly put on hold. Ruth’s husband is a man who cannot hold down a job but full of hot air and schemes that never work. Everyday, he promises to make it big, and in the process gives his son inflated ideas as well. There is this scene where one morning he comes to her all excited; he tells Ruth about this new friend who has come up with this new idea and all it needs is for her to help him raise some money. All Ruth says is “eat your eggs”, serving him breakfast with a deadpan look. He admits Ruth looks tired and is probably so, what with the years of work in the kitchen but all this is going to change, he says and she repeats, “eat your eggs.” He says, “Here, I am sharing my dreams of making it big, so so big, and all you say is eat-your-eggs!” “Here, I am telling you about myself and my new venture, and all you say is eat your eggs! What kind of wife are you…” “The kind who lives in Buckingham Palace, now eat-your-eggs.” He says this is the problem about coloured men who don’t have women to hold them up, make them feel like somebody. She retorts, there are coloured men who DO things. He says no thanks to the coloured women. She says, well being a coloured woman I guess, I can’t help myself.

The words are so clever. We were reading excerpts of this play in a college as they had asked me to direct it for their college fest. While reading Ruth’s character, I saw her look at me with approval. This is what happens when you work on stage a lot, it’s not easy to lower the curtain and shut out the character on stage. She sometimes follows you home and jumps into the intimacy of your life.

That’s the thing about stage, it so closely leans on real life.

(The writer is a theatre director and novelist)