Sarita Choudhury is starring in acclaimed playwright Vijay Tendulkar’s work ‘Sakharam Binder’ in Manhattan. This play, Tendulkar’s most famous work, was once banned in India:

“Sakharam Binder”… tells the story of Sakharam’s seventh and eighth “birds” (as his envious friend Dawood calls Sakharam’s women). Laxmi (Anna George) is shy, submissive and pious, whereas Champa (Sarita Choudhury), her successor, is brash, voluptuous and spoiled… Ms. Choudhury radiates a proud, willful acuity that reads as desperate indignation as Champa shirks, malingers and turns to alcohol to blunt her disgust at Sakharam’s sexual demands…

Mr. White vividly captures the strange and complex pathology of Sakharam, who seems to want to please his “birds” even as he bullies them and who speaks like a freethinking crusader for women’s rights one minute and like an philistine scornful of their devotion to him the next… Like Brecht’s Mother Courage, he exploits a corrupt system for personal advantage, then discovers that the price of playing the game is everything he hoped to protect.

The last play I heard of starring Choudhury was the off-Broadway ‘Roar’ by Palestinian-American playwright Betty Shamieh. I ran into Shamieh at a BBQ; despite her heavy subject matter, she’s very funny in person.

Part of the IAAC’s Tendulkar Festival, through Nov. 14 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th St., Manhattan.