Could there be anything better than an orgy of sepia theatre? Yes. An orgy of lesbian strippers. Aside from that, this is tops:

Los Angeles

“The God Botherers” — Actress Reena Dutt performs in an ensemble comedy about aid workers in Tambia, a place where there’s no rule of law, the last war’s ruined everything, and the next war will ruin everything else. So it’s like a session of the U.S. House acted out on stage. Mar. 25-Apr 24, Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 7:30 p.m., $15-24, Pasadena Playhouse. (via Hollywood Masala)

“Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead” — (Insert any random joke here about the title describing the dating scene in L.A.). Actor Mark Antani performs a one-man show originally written in 1994 by playwright Eric Bogosian. It’s a collection of eight pieces, with each showcasing a different character expressing rage and unhappiness in a humorous and witty fashion. Mar. 25-May 1, Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 5 p.m., $15, Third Street Theatre.

“Are You With Me? F**k the Middle East — What’s for Dessert?” — As character Vinay Khan, actor Ajay Mehta performs a solo comedy about growing up in India, moving to New York, and becoming the banquet manager of the United Nations. It’s partially based on his real life. We’re guessing that the part about the U.N. is fabricated, as Mehta’s performance demonstrates an effectiveness and efficiency rarely seen from the league of nations. Mar. 23-31, Wed.-Sat. 7:30 p.m., free, reservations required, The Complex.

San Francisco

“Mamlet” — Writer Nihar Patel’s David-Mamet-ized version of Hamlet gets a staged reading by members of the prestigious American Conservatory Theatre. It joins other winners of the 2005 "Write Like Mamet" contest. Rumor has it that Mamet himself entered, but wasn’t chosen. We’re assuming that it’s because his newest piece performs earlier in the evening, and the theatre didn’t want patrons to O.D. on pure street-grade Mamet dialogue. Apr. 2, Sat. 10:30 p.m., free, Geary Theater.

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Playwright Anuvab Pal has a new play in staged reading this Saturday, March 26th, 7pm at the Queens Museum of Art. The play is ‘a historical comedy set in a Savile Row suit shop.’ He writes:

It’s called Out of Fashion and it’s an hour long comedy about British tailors, Indian fashion designers, Irish patent clerks and Indian freedom fighters. It attempts to be funny. Would be great to see you there.

The QMA is currently hosting art exhibits from both American desis and the subcontinent. Here’s the rest of their theater schedule:

• Saturday, 6:30-7pm, preview of Seven.11
• Sunday, 4:15-5pm, staged reading of Deepa Purohit’s Exile: ‘a story of a South Asian woman’s journey through memory which spans two continents in search of lost loves’

The museum is also hosting dance performances throughout this weekend. Full details here.

Update: Vernacular Body reviews Out of Fashion:

The play was good fun, despite the absence of props and an abundance of wild accent shifts: neither the upper-crustish (fathers) nor the Dublinish was particularly convincing, and the cockney (sons) was a complete cock-up.  Had a good mind to send them tapes of David Beckham talking, innit?  But there was much wild punnery to be had, Alfred J. Prufrock played a major role, andapt indeed was the nudge-nudge wink-wink cleverness of the Monty-Python-meets-Falstaff variety (which I happen to like) as the play was set in a Saville Row tailor shop.  I confirmed with the playwright afterwards that Wilde and Stoppard were major influences on his sensibility.

Desipina is again hosting its low-rent, highwire theater collection Seven.11 in Manhattan, and Anuvab Pal is contributing a new piece called Paris. The schtick is that playwrights of all colors contribute seven tales of 11 minutes each, all set in convenience stores. It sounds much like 11.9.01: September 11, a collection of short films 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame long by filmmakers including Mira Nair, Sean Penn, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros), Samira Makhmalbaf and Youssef Chahine.

As far as creative gimmicks go, this is a good one: even the Manhattan Project found creative benefit in time constraints, although nuclear incineration has been known to be motivating. This is the third year of Seven.11, so it’s clearly a successful franchise. The quick-witted Lethia Nall, who was so good in Alter Ego’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, appears in both Paris and Soonderella.

Anuvab Pal’s PARIS: Paris is a play about an 11 minute conversation without consequence on a lazy Paris afternoon…

Samrat Chakrabarti/Sanjiv Jhaveri’s new musical SOONDERELLA: a fairy tale of a different colour… The only way to follow up with last year’s wildly successful A Very Desi Christmas, a pop musical adaptation of Scrooge, is with another 11-minute musical set in the convenience store…

It’s also a clear demarcation between Right and Left Coast desi stereotypes; the Left Coast analogue would be 80 tales of 86 engineers, but who’d go see it? Bugaboo and nerdcore call my bluff.

Sajit posted about a version of Bombay Dreams set to open in Bombay itself.

The show may have the opposite problem in Bombay from the one it had on Broadway. Would it seem the least bit novel in the city that serves as its muse? Or would Bombayites give it a collective shrug, like Delhiites did with Monsoon Wedding: ‘That’s a documentary, not a musical’?

I had the damnedest time getting my cousins who grew up in India to see Bombay Dreams with me. ‘This is a play about Bollywood?’ they said. ‘But we watch that every day only. Isn’t it?’

Here’s a chance to catch one of my favorite plays by one of my favorite playwrights while scratching your desi sense of economy at the same time. A free staged reading of Chaos Theory by Anuvab Pal is taking place Mon 1/17 and Tue 1/18 in Manhattan.

Chaos Theory is an intensely romantic, delayed-gratification talkie for people who dig wordplay — you Before Sunset, Raincoat, Tumhari Amrita, Woody Allen fans. Y’all know who you are, you silver-tongued scoundrels.

The reading is being put on by Pulse Ensemble Theatre; Rajesh Bose, Sanjiv Jhaveri and Rita Wolf (My Beautiful Laundrette, Homebody / Kabul) star, Alexa Kelly directs.

As Sepia Mutiny mentioned, the NYC run of the London hit musical Bombay Dreams closed this past weekend. Rediff reports, however, on an interesting, far more long-term development within the cast –

As Manu Narayan, Tamyra Gray, Sriram Ganesan and Anjali Bhimani joined 34 of their peers in Bombay Dreams to take the final Broadway bow on New Year’s Day, at least one actor was taking home more than memories and an impressive resume. Aalok Mehta, part of the ensemble cast, is now engaged to Anisha Nagarajan who played Priya, the idealistic movie director, in the musical for about six months.

Some interesting financial info & hope for a Bombay Dreams road tour –

Most among the cast of Bombay Dreams are hoping to join the road tour that could start this summer, provided the producers, who have lost about half of their $14 million investment in the Broadway production, are able to raise fresh investment and get good backing from regional promoters.

Playbill.com has a preview of Gheri Dosti which is a series of five short plays with a “South Asian bent,” opening tomorrow in NYC:

The red-hot issue of same-sex marriage became a sticking point during the past election year in the United States. It’s no secret, however, that this controversial topic extends well beyond American soil to even the most remote reaches of the planet. Circle East, a New York-based company, will present Gehri Dosti, a collection of five short plays exploring same-sex relationships in South Asia, beginning on Jan. 6.

Playwright and director Paul Knox has conceived the work, which had its world premiere last fall at Harvard University’s Leverett Old Library. Prior to that production, the individual sections that comprise Gehri Dosti: 5 Short Plays with a South Asian Bent had been developed in festivals the world over, from New York to Cape Town, South Africa. The Harvard production represented the first time the pieces was combined to form a full evening of exploratory theatre.

With the AIDS epidemic spreading exponentially through developing countries, Gehri Dosti is as much about spreading knowledge as it is about civil rights advocacy. In addition to serving as Circle East’s executive director, Knox is the co-founder of the Tides Foundation’s India Fund, an organization that facilitates community building efforts and educational initiatives among South Asia’s gay groups. He has also conceived and co-produced Mela: A South Asian Festival of performances on the Indian subcontinent. For his work with the Russian Academy of Theater Arts, Mr. Knox has been a co-recipient of the United Nations Society of Writers Award.

As I type these very words, Bombay Dreams on Broadway is finishing up the final performance of its eight-month run. Its closing unleashes a horde of desi actors with Broadway experience. May they find their way to productions far beyond these comfortable shores.

Richard Corliss of Time analyzes Bombay Dreams’ short run:

[Meera] Syal, a writer and performer on the Anglo-Indian sitcom Goodness Gracious Me, could assume that the London audience would be knowing too — they’d be familiar enough with the genre to get the jokes poked at it. Bollywood films get a fairly wide release in the U.K., often making the weekend box-office top ten. Because the South Asian community is proportionately larger in Britain than in the U.S., the Bollywood culture more deeply permeates the official culture. Indian films can gross millions in the States and not be seen by anyone outside the subcontinental diaspora…

Essentially, he had to write a primer on Bollywood: explain the genre, then rack some jokes about it. Most of Syal’s best lines vanished. The show became soft and lumpy. The New York Bombay Dreams was a desperate, failed reworking of the London version… The Indo-American audience wasn’t large enough to keep it afloat, and it didn’t attract the idle non-Desi curious.

The outreach to critics was a disaster for this straightforward, unironic ’50s-style show. The London show had a better book and more physically striking actors, though the New York version had stronger singers and a slicker production.

And what is the sound of one critic’s heart breaking? Corliss has found his guru, and it’s the show’s composer A.R. Rahman:

Rahman is not just India’s most prominent movie songwriter… but, by some computations, the best-selling recording artist in history. His scores have sold more albums than Elvis or the Beatles or all the Jacksons: perhaps 150 million, maybe more.

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Over the weekend in England, a play about improprieties at a Sikh temple took a violent turn as reported by the AFP and several others:

A black comedy that triggered a weekend mini-riot because of its references to rape in a fictional Sikh temple has been cancelled, the playhouse in the English Midlands that was staging the play said.

The Birmingham Repertory Theatre said that, after consultations with police and Sikh community representatives, it was lowering the curtain on further performances of “Behzti” (Dishonour).

The piece, by Sikh actress turned playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, had sold out its entire run, but it upset Sikhs enough to prompt a series of peaceful demonstrations which turned violent on Saturday.

Three men were arrested, five police officers hurt, and the audience of some 600 evacuated in the melee, in which up to 400 protesters stormed the Rep, damaged doors, set off fire alarms and damaged backstage equipment.

The violence was apparently due to the same type of sanctimonious logic that we see displayed in so many other religious traditions.

…Sewa Singh Mandha, chairman of the Council of Sikh Gurdwaras in Birmingham, said “Behzti” offends on the grounds of falsehood.

“In a Sikh temple, sexual abuse does not take place, kissing and dancing don’t take place, rape doesn’t take place, homosexual activity doesn’t take place, murders do not take place,” he told BBC radio.

“I am bringing to the attention of the management of the theatre the sensitive nature of the play, because by going into the public domain it will cause deep hurt to the Sikh community.”