Bhubaneswar: Manana’s five-day-long 45th Foundation Day and Drama Festival-2024 kick started at Rabindra Mandap in Bhubaneswar on January 3.
Manana is one of the premier theatre organisations in the state, founded by Manoj Pattanayak and some like-minded theatre personalities in 1979 in Bhubaneswar.
After the auspicious lighting the lamp ceremony attended by guests like director of the Culture Department Dilip Routray, president of Odisha Sangeet Natak Akademi Guru Aruna Mohanty, AGM (Marketing) of State Bank of India Amaresh Das and group editor of Prameya group Gopal Mohapatra, the felicitation ceremony was held.
On the inaugural evening, three noted theatre personalities were felicitated. Ratiranjan Samman, Banabihari Pattanayak Samman and Gopalchandra Pattanayak Samman were conferred upon Lalatendu Rath, Bharat Kishore Prusty and Dinesh Das respectively.
The inaugural play of the festival was ‘Pasanda Palabhuta’, staged by Manana, written by Sudhanshu Naik and directed by Manoj Pattanayak.
The play revolves around a rape survivor and her poor parents. The first scene opens to a room of Satyaranjan Mohapatra’s house where his daughter Maitri, a rape survivor, is sitting with her head resting on her knees and crying.
Then Maitri’s mother Shanti and father tries to console her advising her to forget the ordeal. Then starting from a ruling party leader to opposition leader, an advocate, a police officer and journalist visit Maitri’s house one after another for their own advantage. After not getting justice, the trio takes the extreme decision of ending lives. All the actors tried their level best to give justice to their characters. Kalpana Rout, Niranjan Sahu, Seema Sahu, Anuj Pattanayak, Saroj Pattanayak, Ayaskant Swain, Mahesh Panda and Laxminarayan Nanda were excellent in portraying their characters such as Maitri, her father Satyaranjan Mohapatra, mother Shanti, Opposition leader, police officer, ruling party leader, advocate and journalist respectively.
The four other plays to be staged are ‘Suna Sujane’ by Dynamic Platform (Bhubaneswar), ‘Suka Sari Katha’ by Expressions (Bhubaneswar), ‘April 27’ by Mirror Theatre (Belpahar) and ‘Trishanku’ by Shree Cultural Association (Sambalpur). A total of 12 theatre personalities will be felicitated on these four evenings, three on each evening.
