French Comedy+Desi Playwright =Everybody Wins!

My university has never staged a play by an Asian playwright. Not in over 75 years. We've hit all of the other continents (except Antarctica, of course... I don't believe there are any Antarctican playwrights, but I could be wrong). But somehow we've left out Asia.

So when I started planning the Hyderabad trip, nearly a year ago, I told my faculty committee that I wanted to stage a play by an Indian (or Indian-American/desi) playwright when I came back.

It would, after all, be a first for the university, and if we marketed it correctly, we had the potential to tap into a large desi audience.

We tossed around the idea for months, analyzing the pros and cons.

One of the cons -- the one that made the season selection committee the most nervous -- was that our department had no desi acting students, and things might get a little racially tidgy if we had white students playing brown characters.

I countered with "well, you don't have to do Muggy Night in Mumbai -- if we did one of the kajillion plays based on a section of the Mahabharata, we could pull a Peter Brook and cast anyone we like."

And, theoretically, color-blind casting should work the other way around (although, truth be told, it rarely works the way it was intended to -- and one of these days I'll do a post on why).

But in the end, and probably for the best, we elected not to pursue this option.

When the season was chosen, I was given Moliere's Tartuffe. Which will be fun; it will be my first "comedy of manners" play, and there is plenty of opportunity for glittery silliness.

As the director, of course, I get to choose the translation.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered there was a verse translation of Tartuffe by Ranjit Bolt.

Looks like my university gets its first desi playwright after all.