“Who said theater audiences are a poor show in Kerala? The plays were staged to packed houses and we received a lot of invitations from the enthusiastic audiences to perform in other places,” said Parvathy, one of the organizers, a prominent actor and a PR consultant.

The Summer Festival was kicked off in the central Kerala port city of Kochi on May 11 and then toured to places like Kasaragod, Payyanur, Kozhikode, Thrissur and Kollam.

Writers, filmmakers, actors and other cultural figures like MT Vasudevan Nair, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Revathy, Vasu Pradeep, KPAC Lalitha, Nedumudi Venu, Shantakumari, Ibrahim Vengara, Ramanujan and A. Rajakrishnan went to various venues during the tour to watch the shows.

Abhinaya is a common platform based in the state capital for theater practitioners in Kerala and it has been active since 1992, attracting audiences. Abhinaya successfully conducted four theater festivals with the active participation of groups in India and abroad.

With the huge success of the maiden touring festival, it has now decided to make it an annual event from next year, taking it to more places in Kerala and abroad. The chief architects Jyothish, Abhinaya’s artistic director, and Raghoothaman, its founding director, have already participated in many international theater events. Abhinaya received accolades at prestigious theater festivals like Villeneuve en Scene-Avignon Festival in France (2007), Festival de Alamada in Portugal, (2000), Bharat Rang Mahotsav in New Delhi (2001 and 2003), Rang-Swarn in New Delhi (2003), and Prithvi Theater Festival in Mumbai (2003).

“Many of us do not know that some of the most prominent theater personalities in India are originally from Kerala. Abhinaya will provide a platform for our home-grown practitioners to reach out to them,” said Jyothish.

Jyothish has been awarded the Sanskriti Pratishtan Award for theater in 2009 and was invited by the British Council to attend the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival in August 2009. Like Raghoothaman, he too is an alumnus of the School of Drama in Thrissur.

“Earlier, we used to wonder why we were not receiving back home the kind of response that we receive abroad. But, we were flabbergasted by the applause we received wherever we went with these works in Kerala,” said Raoothaman. “Now, we realize that the problem lies with us, not with the audience. We never reached out to them with quality work that easily strikes a chord.”

Senior bureaucrat and Kerala’s Tourism Secretary, V. Venu, took a month’s break to be with the troupe as an actor and an organizer. He played a prominent role of a corrupt contractor in “Bridges,” which was based on K. Ayyappapanicker’s poem. He managed to put on a stellar performance.

“We were performing in the northern parts of Kerala for the first time. It’s a strenuous job but the energy we received from it is also tremendous,” said Raghoothaman. “The experimental theater has a good audience here”.

Abhinaya proposes to establish a theater village at Plathara on the outskirts of the city with a theater school, performing space, cottages, research wing, library, studios, space for the artistically-inclined marginalized sections of society and a farming community.