The New Indian Express ·
Ekatha brings out a new fantasy thriller play, Maya, for the Chennai audience
Somewhere inside an ancestral house in Kerala, beneath the shade of a sacred grove, a dead girl is waiting to unravel the mystery behind her death. Her name is Maya. Her cousin Anjali brings a young professor to the ancestral home for a festival of snake worship. The professor, who researches Kerala’s folk culture, arrives looking for ritual and folklore. Instead, he encounters Maya’s spirit.
Maya is the latest production of the theatre group Ekatha, an English-language fantasy thriller, directed by KP Rajeev. The play moves through romance, crime, myth, and superstition as the professor tries to understand what happened to Maya. Rajeev says the original spark for the play came from Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s short story ‘Neelavelicham’, which was later made into the films ‘Bhargavi Nilayam’ (1964) and ‘Neelavelicham’ (2023). “A thriller around a spirit who is sharing its story, and I know the possibility of building a thriller around that. There are elements of fantasy, romance, and mystery. So, it is an out-and-out entertainment.” But Maya is not an adaptation of Basheer’s story. Rajeev emphasises that distinction.
The play enters the world of the nagakaavu, the sacred groves where snakes are worshipped. Rajeev describes the tradition through its music, drawings, and rituals. In Kerala, he says, the custodians of these sacred groves are the Pulluvas, a community associated with a distinctive musical tradition called Pulluvan paattu.
