Portrait

this time, it’s not just the cast that got turned into people from south park….

upper row, from left to right (the crew) :
jake oorloff (makeup), asvajit boyle (front of house), ryan and christine holsinger (lights), akhry ameer (producer-mind adventures theatre co.), hashir milhan (projector handling), deshan tennekoon (photographs and moral support), nuzreth abdul hameed (sound), shehani peries (stage manager), twiggy wijesinghe (front of house), sarah rahman (front of house).

lower row, from left to right (the cast and director) :
arun welendawe-premetilleke (william), ruvin de silva (jack), subha wijesiriwardena (eva), tracy holsinger (director), erasha sugathapala (emily), brandon ingram (jim), tehani chitty (laura).

here’s a post that cerno made after having watched the opening night’s performance of chatroom last night.

Chatroom Rocks!!!!!!

Just got back from Punchi theatre. What a show. What a show! Theater like the ancients meant it! Well done bravo and all that..

the rest of the post here.

all i can say is, thank you. thank you for coming and thank you for blogging about your thoughts. at the end of the day, we’re there up onstage to talk about a very serious and crucial issue that absolutely needs to be addressed. to us success is two fold; whether we’ve lived up to the expectations of the audience and whether we’ve given you something to think about.

at the center of the play chatroom is the dark and complicated matter of suicide. last night my friend hiran told me that there are thousands of teenagers every year that broadcast their suicides over the internet for the whole world to see. what drives someone to do this? what gives them the idea? what makes them feel that hopeless about this life we live?

theatre is an art, a form of expression. and we’re getting up there on two more occasions to try and find the answers to the questions raised above. of course the answers themselve are elusive and no one is sure if they exist at all. what we can do is bring these topics to forums of discussion, have people talk about it and find resolutions together. and if not resolutions, then, a way to deal.

chatroom, by enda walsh, is a mind adventures theatre production directed by tracy holsinger.

come and see for yourself.

chatroom is being staged at the punchi theatre in borella, tomorrow (the 28th) and the day after (the 29th). tickets available at the theatre. show commences at 8 pm and is an hour long.

if the characters in ‘chatroom’ were charatcers in south park…….

by ruvin de silva.

for an un-resized version of it, go here.

are on sale at the punchi theatre, borella from today onwards. get them while you can.

i was just going through kottu and i felt an overwhelming sense of having missed so much. i don’t hang around kottu as much as i used to, but everytime i come back, i see new names and pivotal arguments. at the end of the day, it hasn’t failed to serve its purpose.

i propose we meet again. there was a kottu bloggers meet up more than a year ago, and i feel we are in dire need of another one. maybe this time the ones that didn’t turn up last time will make an appearance, i hope the newer names will turn up, and i know that the same old oldies will be there for sure.

what say you? let me know and i’ll try to make it happen.

from the 27th-29th of june at the punchi theatre, borella.

a rerun of enda walsh’s chatroom directed by tracy holsinger and produced by the mind adventures theatre company.

if you didn’t see the initial run, then it would be plain silly to miss it again. and if you’ve seen it already, come again…

a few surprises? perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

for reviews of the initial run go here.
here and here are what smriti daniel of the sunday times wrote about chatroom.

oh ho, once again, there are those that believe that the expulsion of tamils from colombo was ‘unavoidable’ and ‘necessary’. you have to love it, those are always the excuses that those that have no idea what’s truly going on and have no actual policies or opinions on the matter use; oh sorry sir, it is bad, but unavoidable and necessary. oh sorry, i know it sucks, but it’s unavoidable and necessary.

well here’s some news for you, there were a whole bunch of people, including george bush, that felt the completely immoral and unjust war in iraq was unavoidable and necessary. there were a whole bunch of people, including adolf hitler, who thought cleansing the german ‘empire’ of jews was unavoidable and necessary, so much so that they went to the extent of brutally murdering 11 million people to achieve this goal. yeah, the holocaust. beat that. unavoidable and necessary, eh?

hah, unavoidable and necessary; what rubbish. it makes me want to laugh and throw up at the same time, all these rich yuppies, living in their comfortable flats in foreign cities going to prestigious universities, creating nationalist groups on facebook, trying to seem as if they know, caving into the ‘it was unavoidable and necessary’ mentality just because it’s so easy, talking their way through with their pseudo-liberal ideals. ‘oh i’m very liberal, but that’s just a facade, i’m actually a bigot; you see i believe that not only is it ok, but that it is unavoidable and necessary to send hundreds of people based on their race back to where they came from.’

oh please, feed me another. as if this ‘back to where they came from’ rot isn’t the last thing this country needs. as if we cant see that just by promoting the notion that these tamils must go back to where they came from, we’re strengthening the idea that this is not their country to begin with.

hello?! they are ‘informants’, ’spies’, sent here on ’suicide missions’. sure, because of those few that the system does not have the resources nor the intelligence to pick out and find, every single tamil person needs to be penalized for the actions of LTTE. sure, every single tamil person supports and works for the LTTE, haven’t you heard? oh it’s ok. they’re poor, they’re tamil, who gives? it’s not racist, it’s simply unavoidable and necessary! the government is simply ensuring the safety of the general public in colombo (oh no, not by any means their own asses), and of course the tamil people aren’t a part of this ‘general public’! the government has no responsibility towards them, or their safety.

listen up, folks. the law cannot, and does not, forbid anyone that is a citizen of this country from residing anywhere in this country. you cannot simply pounce on people one morning, and giving them no time, no rhyme nor reason, pack them away like sardines in a can onto a bus and send them on their way to a place in which their safety is so under threat that they might as well be dead.

more than this being an extreme act of racism, an insensitive violation of the most fundamental human rights, a move that is bound to make things ten times worse, a move that further proves to the tamil community is sri lanka that the gosl does not care for them, and that they will always remain a minority that isn’t cared about and does not have the protection of the state nor its law, more than being immoral, unjust or wrong, it was ILLEGAL. it was illegal, and yet it could not have been done without the involvement of a superior authority given the extent of military involvement. corruption, much? injustice, much?

the protest at the lipton circus on wednesday beckoned to more than 700 people. and for once, protestors saw results. a big heads up to everyone that came, it is evidence to the fact that really, a difference can be made.

some people live in an alternate reality in which this was unavoidable and necessary. for them, i have only pity.