Playing to the gallery

The Week By Nikhil Raghavan: "When three management grads plunged into as unlikely an area as theatre, they proved that the fundas taught at B-schools can take the sphere to a different level. It all began when Kartik Kumar and Sunil Vishnu ran into each other at Mudra Institute of Communications (MICA), Ahmedabad. The theatre enthusiasts were joined by Preethi Sanjeevi, their junior. After they passed out of MICA, they resolved to form a theatre company after working for a couple of years.

In 2003, Kartik and Sunil researched the theatre scene in various metros before zeroing in on Chennai, where they felt that a professional approach to promote theatre would work. They coaxed Preethi to give up her job in Mumbai and team up with them to float evam. In their parlance, ‘evam’ stands for ‘and’; they always sign off as Kartik evam Sunil.

"At MICA, we had theatre groups; then we went one step further. We hunted for sponsors and got people from outside the college to come to our plays. It was packaging and promotion. It set us thinking—if we could make a success of this in college, why wouldn’t it work in professional theatre?" says Kartik.

Evam was started with the sole purpose of bringing people back into theatre by offering them high-class entertainment that can be described as fun, classy and time well spent. Until now, evam has put up seven English plays, like Python Hyssssteria, Death and Barefoot in the Park.

What makes the trio tick? Says Sunil, "Earlier, a play by the local theatre groups would be staged for just one show in a popular auditorium, with a seating capacity of 1,200. If you missed the show, the play lost the audience. We decided that our plays would have multiple shows. We held our plays in a smaller but better auditorium with a capacity for 500. About 5,000 people were able to come to our plays."

Kartik feels there is "a much wider audience out there". "There is so much interaction in our productions," he says. "We have not been able to reach out to the masses, especially the youth, because of lack of funds." But that is changing now, with corporates coming forward to sponsor the plays. "My competition is not other theatre groups, but movie halls, coffee shops and cafeterias," he says.

Evam plans to put up some interesting shows this year, like Biloxi Blues and December Shorts. Theatre critic Elizabeth Roy feels the group has brought "some classy stuff to the city". "One special feature about evam is that it is the first young professional theatre group in Chennai that has been successful and is making a living out of it," she says.

What will the group move on to? "We will do movies, television and any other platform for communicating entertainment. We are storytellers and we are the content; our achievement lies in the way we package ourselves," says Sunil, who directs all the plays with Kartik.

"We do allow actors to improvise, if we feel that is better than how we have envisaged the scene," says Kartik. Evam plans to infuse more entertainment aspects in their productions, like multimedia formats. "If I have to pull a guy away from Matrix, I need to give him the same value for money," says Sunil. And that is something evam does well. "