That is the broad premise of a new play called Chafed that will be staged this weekend. It features four actors in different stages of their careers — Siddharth, Prerna, Ayesha and Aarav. Siddharth and Prerna are in a relationship. Ayesha is the latter’s confidante. Aarav is Siddharth’s younger brother, and the four of them sit down together for dinner one day when there is friction between the two lovers. The trouble in their paradise gets exacerbated because of Ayesha and Aarav’s interference. But the core of the couple’s differences lies in their contrasting ideologies. Siddharth is a man of discipline who does most of the decision-making in the relationship, while Prerna is someone who chooses to keep her emotions and experiences bottled up. That’s the sort of emotional dissonance that the two need to resolve.

Sunny Sharma, the playwright who’s also produced the play and acts in it, tells us that the #MeToo movement was raging when he first conceived the plot in 2019. “As a society, we were debating what the roles of men and women are. I was a spectator leaning from one side to the other. But I noticed that both sides weren’t willing to listen to each other at all. They were talking amongst themselves and a lot of it was just gossip without any critical analysis,” he says, adding that that’s when he decided to model the four characters as actors, since the relationships of celebrities get spoken about more than others. Two actors in a relationship, Sharma continues, also have their unique set of problems since “the dilemma of choice might get to you after a while because you’re considered desirable”. Be that as it may, their differences are for them to resolve, and that holds true for other people in conventional jobs, too, because at the end of the day, matters of the heart are personal.  

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