Not really into Bombay Dreams? Well if you live in New York you may be in luck. Sakharam Binder is being staged by The Play Company. From Villagevoice.com:

How often do New York theatergoers get a chance to see a premier work from a major Indian dramatist, staged with the collaboration of the writer himself? Almost never. Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder was written and first performed in 1974 and hardly qualifies as a new play. Thirty years after setting Indian censors aflame, it makes its New York debut in a spare, lucid, and altogether thrilling production from the Play Company. At a time when the airheaded confection Bombay Dreams passes for subcontinental theater, Sakharam Binder not only feels vital, but painfully necessary.

Sounds interesting, but I don’t know the story really. What’s it about?

Sakharam is a fortyish bookbinder who offers lodging to cast-off women in exchange for housekeeping favors and the occasional fuck. The drama focuses on two of his concubines—the introverted and ultra-religious Laxmi (Anna George) and the arrogant and slutty Champa (Sarita Choudhury). Their sequential stories are told in highly diagrammatic fashion—Laxmi brings out the Fagin-ish slave master in Sakharam while the insatiable Champa reduces him to a lovelorn puppy.

Oohhh. Saucy.

Update: I had missed the fact that Sepia Mutiny has already covered this story in more detail here.

A Brooklyn theater company is presenting a minimalist staging of E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India:

… the company uses a single, brushed-metal set, simple white costumes, a few chairs and props, and a small cast of actors to present Forster’s multilayered story of cultural conflict in colonial India… there are some clever bits of invention in Ms. Meckler’s staging – for example, a lumbering elephant represented by a pyramid of softly swaying actors… no more illuminating is the decision to recast the tale as a flashback, and employ the novel’s most prominent Hindu character, Godbole, as narrator…

[Forster] clearly meant Dr. Aziz to embody the unfettered emotionalism that he observed in Indian Muslims. As played by Mr. Caan, he is temperate and considered, a perfectly turned-out, machine-tooled product of British colonialism. Dr. Aziz concludes the play with a passionate speech denouncing the British occupying forces, but you wouldn’t be surprised to see him turn around and invite his enemy to join him in a game of cricket.

At Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene through Saturday.

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.

Here’s a great photo gallery from the April premiere of Bombay Dreams in New York. Celebs in the photos include A.R. Rahman, Padma Lakshmi, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, Meera Syal, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Claire Danes, Edie Falco (The Sopranos), Kenneth Cole, Donald Trump and hydraulically-assisted girlfriend Melania Knauss, Ivana Trump with boy-toy, and former Miss USA Shandi Finnessey. And it’s interesting to see, out of costume, the guy who plays Sweetie the hijra. Salman Rushdie and Bill and Hillary Clinton have also seen the show.

Janet Jackson was offered the role of Rani the seductress, replacing Ayesha Dharker. With family-friendly lyrics like ‘Got a nice package all right, guess I’m gonna have to ride it tonight,‘ and her patriotic role in the Teat Offensive, Jackson would fare well with desi family audiences.

A London production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night reimagines the play by setting it in modern India. Stephen Beresford’s production opened Aug. 26 in London for a ten-week run, featuring a mostly desi cast for the classic gender-bending, mistaken identity tale.

The production relies on notable actors including Kulvinder Ghir (Goodness Gracious Me) as Feste, Raza Jaffrey (fresh from London’s Bombay Dreams) as the duke, and Neha Dubey (the cutie in Monsoon Wedding). Shireen Martineau plays the androgynous female lead, Viola. Jatinder Verma from Tara Arts is advising; he previously put together an all-desi version of Moliere’s Tartuffe at the National Theatre in London.

Beresford said India was exactly what he was looking for:

…[M]odern people in a modern setting but living in a culture thatÂ’s rooted in its past, mysterious, religious and magical; a place where attitudes to sex, love and death are frank and realistic, but where women might veil themselves in front of strangers; a world of shrines and marriage settlements, where ancient music and ritual are a part of daily life… Once India had suggested itself, the solutions followed. Feste becomes a Baul singer, a Bengali tradition of nomadic minstrels and soothsayers… [A]n Elizabethan setting carries its own problems. If you want the freshness and sophistication of the play to come across, you set yourself an uphill struggle by kitting out the actors with ruffs…

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Anuvab Pal, one of my most favorite playwrights, is unleashing a new play upon the world at the NYC Fringe Festival tomorrow. The Fatwa synopsis:

A comedy about two elderly men who try to take advantage of the current American political climate to fulfill lifelong artistic desires. Both men have famous names, but are not famous themselves. They are failed writers who in attempting to promote a blasphemous novel, attempt to engineer a fatwa…

More here:

Pal compares favorably to Salman Rushdie in verbal pyrotechnics and Tom Stoppard in barbed wit, and he’s starting to get mainstream recognition… like Woody Allen minus the neuroticism… Fatwa is a thinly disguised satire of Rushdie’s horrific hide-and-seek with the mullahs.

Pal’s work is a treat, go see the play!

Fatwa by Anuvab Pal, NYC Fringe Festival, Players Theater, Studio 3C, 115 MacDougal St, New York, NY, Aug. 14-15, 20-22, 25, 26, tickets at TicketWeb

Florida is getting a Bollywood version of one of my favorite Shakespearean plays, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’