LIGHTS OUT PLEASE

- Vaishnavi Swaminathan

Lights Out Please, the theatre club of SSN has seen great success, since its inception in 2012.

Here's a look at our accomplishments....

ACCIDENTALLY IN LOVE

              Accidentally in Love, a satirical take on perceptions of today's youth on relationships, was Lights Out Please's maiden production. The production process was extensive and started with auditions being conducted for students of all years. A cast of 14 actors supported by a crew of 20 students formed the core of the production. The actors were trained and tuned to the demands of the stage in a month long workshop, post which they rehearsed for the play for a duration of 30 days. The play was staged in the campus at the Main Auditorium in the month of September. The three act play was a success and the overall reviews were positive and encouraging, laying the foundation for the quality of theater that SSN has been associated with in Chennai today.

A DIME, A DOZEN

     Following the success of the college play "Accidentally in Love", Lights Out Please shifted its arena to a bigger stage at Crea- Shakthi's National Inter- College Theatre Festival, Dramalog. It was the first time we were staging an original script, "A Dime, A Dozen", penned by Manoj Krishnan who also directed the play. The plot revolves around two brothers who hide their actual identity and decide to invite their children as guests for a get together at their house. The purpose of the get together is for them to decide who can be the rightful owner of their property. What follows is a series of chaos and confusion seasoned with humour from the beginning to end. Karthik A, was commended by the judges for his splendid portrayal of the character Jiju.

     Albeit Lights Out Please did not emerge victorious at this edition of Dramalog, it was a big step towards the quality of theatre we performed at a prestigious stage, competing with other college theatre groups. 

BLACK COMEDY

    Post the above mentioned plays, the next stage for Lights Out Please was Kuruksastra,SASTRA University's annual theatre fest in the month of April,2013. We adapted the play "Black Comedy" ,originally written by Peter Shaffer . The play had a rib-tickling comic storyline about how Abraham , an unemployed youth tries  desperately to impress his fiance's orthodox iyengar father and the series of problems, he confronts in the process.. The play was received by a standing ovation and went on to win the competition as well. Aside from being the overall winner, our own Karthik.H also won the best Director award.

      This provided to be a major stepping stone for the group as this performance,helped  Lights Out Please  bag an oppurtunity to go public for the first time.

    So, under the banner of Crea Sakthi , as part of their Campus Theater Initiative, we staged Black Comedy once more, at Music Academy (mini hall) to a packed auditiorium. This too,like the competition was very well recieved by the audience,confirming that Lights Out Please was on the right track.

RUMORS

The young brigade of LOP, with a brand new cast, decided to take part in NIT Trichy’s Theatrix event, organized as part of their annual cultural event called ‘Festember’. The play ‘Rumours’, written by Neil Simon was chosen. The plot revolves around 3 couples who are invited to a party hosted by the Mayor of New York, only to find him in an unconscious state. Each couple tries to do their best to hide what had happened, only for chaos to ensue with an uptight policeman arriving at the scene. With witty humour and classy characters, ‘Rumors’ was indeed a new ball game for all of us. Much attention was paid to every single detail, by a committed crew that LOP boasts of. We got a standing ovation for having put up (in the words of the judge) “a thoroughly entertaining and humorous play” and the first place to boot, which was hopefully only the second of many to come.Abhishek Dutta, also won the award for Best Actor.

SAARANG AND DRAMALOG

    In the January of 2014, Lights Out Please decided to put up Robert Scott's "A Spy with a View" for IIT Saarang's theatricals as well as Crea Shakthi's "Dramalog". The play had Nivedha S, Karthik A and Karthik H acting in it with Karthik H also directing the play. The play also had Shrinidhi S on makeup and costumes, Vignesh S on lights, Abhinandan R on sounds and Vaishnavi S, Siddharth M, Gopalakrishnan S and Srinath N as backstage crew. It was a play that was well received by a vast majority of the audiences and judges who had watched the play and the actors received special mentions from the judges at both the competitions. Aside from special mentions, Lights Out Please boasted 3 award nominations at Dramalog for Best Play - Audience, Best Actor (Karthik A) and Best Supporting Actor which was won by our very own Karthik H.

ROPE

  Rope was the second public ticketed show, by Lights Out Please after Black Comedy. It was also a bigger platform and part of a well known theatre fest called MY Theatre Festival, organised by Crea Sakthi, a youth theatre organisation.

  Up until Rope, LOP has stayed in its comfort zone, performing with comedy as the genre in order to establish itself as a active, performing theatre group. ROPE was the first serious play LOP took up. Adapted from an Alfred Hitchcock movie and Patrick Hamilton's play by the same name, it was set in the mid late 20^th century.

   All production work right from ticketing, marketing, props and sets, lights, sounds,costumes was taken care of by Lights out please under the guidance of a member of Crea-Sakthi.  After a month and a half of rigorous practice, the performance took place on Feb 7^th, 2014 in museum theatre, Egmore. The play was staged to a packed theatre.

  
 Running for one hour and fifteen minutes, the play held the audience’s attention all through.  The authenticity of the sets and costumes, the intense characterisation and the direction were among a few things  appreciated by the audience and critics. 

SPY WITH A VIEW- MUSIC ACADEMY

Lights Out Please staged “A Spy with a view” on popular demand, for the second time on January 25^th, 2014. The show was at Music Academy and we acted in front of a packed hall of 400 people. It was staged as an opener to Crea-Shakthi’s “Two Timing”, in which one of our actors Karthik Hariharan also acted. The play received extremely positive feedback, from a completely different theater enthusiastic audience who had no idea that they were watching our play before “Two Timing”. The genre of the play was comedy with a hint of suspense. Mrs. and Mr. Brown are on a boring holiday when suddenly a man delivers a briefcase to them. The couple soon finds out that it is a spy’s briefcase and Mr. Brown being the hyper person he is, gets absolutely petrified. The story ends with an unusual twist revealing Mrs. Brown to be the spy and the briefcase to have been mistakenly delivered to Mr. Brown, instead of his wife.

So look out for us at INSTINCTS-2014 ......