The importance of mental health is a subject that has been brushed under the rug for a long while now. Shweta Desai, a 31-year-old actor settled in Bengaluru, trained at Anupam Kher’s school, along with her team is making an effort to use her passion for theatre and acting towards a positive cause; to create an awareness about the importance of mental health.
Staging the play, Burn My Diaries, today in namma ooru, she let’s us in on what makes this play so special for her, it’s significance and the struggles they’ve been through to make the production.
Giving us a brief about the play and what we can expect, Shweta says, “This is a story of a woman attempting to defy her condition, her limitations to experience the world as one person and how she discovers ways to co-exist with her many selves. When the line between real and imaginary blurs, when time fluidly rushes in different directions, when memory and experience merge, what is revealed is our mind’s inner workings. By experiencing her resolutions, her imagined reality, her arguments, her battles and her relationship with the past and present, we begin to accept ourselves as we are; humanising the discussion around body-mind wellness.”
The play talks about mental health and well-being and the stigma attached when one is advised to go and speak to a counsellor for help; how important it is for quality living and how our vulnerabilities to situations is also OK.
Art and theatre are often considered a rather easy field of work, when one wraps their head around the idea of it being a real profession that is. Shweta shares the struggles she faced in this journey, “Finding places to rehearse is one big problem. From not being able to afford them to finalising the rehearsing spaces, to a space in residential houses where you cannot voice out loudly, and the list goes on. And when we make a play ready, we want it to be accessible to everyone, and this also means that we travel with it, trying to raise funds which is yet another task to be accomplished. Rehearsals of five to six hours per day spanning over three to four months, the collaborative work with the team, the research. Art demands collective effort.”
She draws inspiration from the world inside and out, even from mundane routine life, from some marvellous plays she sees that bring life on stage, films, books and from people around. She quit her software engineering job to follow her heart and passion for acting. That further led her to taking up a course in Mumbai, and coming back to the city she loves and is attached to, Bengaluru, to live the life of an actor and artist.
“I would call Burn My Diaries an amalgamation of extensive research on psychology, human behaviour, and segments from my previous play BLUR that lead the journey into a full length play,” Shweta concludes. The play will be staged on December 15 at Atta Galatta at 4 pm and 7 pm.
