Boardwalkers’ 'Table for Two' brings the drama of Chennai’s café conversations to the stage

The waiter who inspired this play once “casually and brutally dressed down a ridiculous order” placed by a customer at a Saravana Bhavan in Parrys. Playwright Binoy Mohan was sitting right next to that customer, watched it happen, and laughed instead of helping. He has been thinking about that waiter ever since. And finally, it has culminated in his latest play, Table for Two.

The conversations at the next table take centre stage in Boardwalkers’ Table for Two

The play, written by Binoy, directed by Michael Muthu, and presented by Boardwalkers, is set inside a café where three pairs of diners are having the kinds of conversations that happen when people think nobody is paying attention. There’s the hopelessly optimistic Sameer, fiercely independent Jash, Reem, still figuring life out, and the formidable Mrs M, alongside influencer Neha and her perpetually overworked cameraman, Alex. Then there is Mehru, a politically correct cheerleader and a wingwoman. Keeping an eye on them all are the café’s two waiters, the sharp-tongued Waiter and the endlessly cheerful Raghu, whose patience has its limits.

Binoy writes cafés from the inside out, doing most of his own writing in them. The setting is partly habit, but mostly structural. “A café allowed me to organically weave a narrative around people who have no prior connection,” he says. Unlike most ensemble plays where the cast are family or colleagues, strangers at separate tables can be anyone at all. And what Binoy noticed while writing in those spaces is that people open up completely, oblivious to the next table, unaware that the staff moving around them are very much part of their surroundings.

The comedy is observational rather than situational, which is harder to pull off. “A conversation between two people can be incredibly amusing to an outside observer, while the individuals involved are experiencing something deeply moving,” Binoy explains. Michael Muthu, who previously directed Binoy’s Hold the Mushrooms, has a simple test for deciding whether a script deserves his time. “If I can read the whole play in one sitting and it holds my attention till the end, I consider it worthy of spending time, money and effort to bring it to the stage,” he says. This one passed. His approach to staging it is characteristically unbothered by convention. “We cheated,” he says of how the bustling café atmosphere is created. “We used a technique I call ‘invisibility’. We hope the audience has enough of an imagination to fill in the gaps.”

Actor Mikayil plays Alex, “a grumpy, defeated creative person who is exploited and has let himself be exploited for the sake of growing in their field.” If you have ever worked in a creative industry, you have met Alex. You may have been Alex.

What Mikayil hopes audiences leave with is simple. “That there’s always more than meets the eye. That communication is the only way to break the ice, to get rid of our presumptions about each other and come together.”

Rs 500. On September 11, 12, and 13 at 7 pm. At Alliance francaise de Madras, Nungambakkam.