Reality and imagination are facts of life

Skepticism is a psychological and philosophical play, which touches the elements of absurd-ism, surrealism and 'Skepticism'. The play written and directed by Amaan Ahmad was staged on 31st March at GP Birla Auditorium as a part of World Theatre day. The music was provided by Vedam Vamsi and costumes by SD Heena. This story is a brain child of Amaan where he maps the acting with surrealism.

The story revolves around a psychologically disturbed artist (Niteesh Pandey) who is going through an existential crisis and wants to commit suicide. Several emotions surround him, and each emotion tries to prove its power over the human mind. Meanwhile, reality (Matthew Daniel) and imagination (Sanay Srivastava) are also around the artist. As the play progresses, the protagonist gets confused trying to choose between reality and imagination while Chaos (Kedar Subhedar) and insanity (Ayaz Pasha and Vinaya Sharadha) overpower all the other emotions and insanity instigates the artist to die.

The artist is in pain and is confused as the emotions have a philosophical debate. Reality points out logical reasoning, while Insanity, along with other strong emotions, argue about the actual meaning of life and its futility.

Toward the end, death (Patruni Chidananda Sastry) emerges and kills all the emotions, with hope being the last. Death sits on his throne after killing the artist, but imagination and reality are still there as death cannot touch either of them. The play concludes with the artist lying down on the ground while reality and imagination walk off hand-in-hand, smirking at one another. To conclude, we don't know whether the artist is alive or dead or whether that was artist's imagination or reality.