SouthAsianPlaywrights.org

Synopsis: Actors rehearsing an Elizabethan play written in blank verse begin to find strange inconsistencies that begin to dissolve the line between their “real” selves and their characters. The first act is set in the environs of Shakespeare’s Richard III. A lord seeks the murderer of his son, while his mourning daughter falls for a [...]

Synopsis: Sheela, newly-wed and newly-arrived to a big town, overcomes her alienation and loneliness by getting hooked onto the daily lessons of the TV TUTOR. Her husband, Govind, is an engineeer who is busy with work and busy with his pals.
The TV TUTOR is somewhat magical in its interactions with Sheela, and she gets herself [...]

Synopsis: The play is written in English and Hindi (an original version exists in English and French; English/Spanish and English/Hungarian versions also exist).

The structure of the play and the nature of physical and verbal repetition is such that a spectator how knows only one language either English or French will be able to understand [...]

Synopsis: Homeless men and women waiting for their lives to change on the eve of the new millennium in Tompkins Square Park.
Setting: A tunnel in Tompkins Square Park, NYC
Time Period: December 31st, 1999
Cast Size: 3
Casting:
BOB, white American male, homeless
HENRY, white American male, homeless
MARIETTA, Latin American female immigrant, homeless
This Play is: Unpublished

Synopsis: The experience of an Afghan village woman during the war in Afghanistan following 9/11.
Setting: War-torn Afghanistan
Time Period: 2002
Cast Size: 1
This Play is: Published
Production History:

Theater for the New City, New York, NY (2002)
Contact Theater, Manchester, England
Produced by various university theaters in the US, Canada, Belgium, and Pakistan

Synopsis: No one in the cafe talks to anyone else. All customers are on computers at all times. The waitress, an unemployed actress, is lonely and wants to make friends with the customers, but no one pays attention to her. She begins her own stream of consciousness monologues about how technology has ruined human interaction. [...]

Synopsis: A memory play of surrealistic bird-like humans and their journey from one climate to another and from one culture to another, encompassing oceans, mountains, high and low altitudes. A journey of happiness and loss, of life and death. A journey within and a journey of everyday happenings.
Cast Size: 9
This Play is: Unpublished
Production History:

Theater for [...]

Synopsis: Part 2 of One Thousand Hours of Love, in which Kamla writes letters to her possibly imaginary English lover, James.
Setting: A small cottage in Kerala, on a rainy day.
Cast Size: 1
Casting:
KAMLA: A South Asian woman
This Play is: Unpublished
Production History:

Commissioned by Mabou Mines in New York, produced for their summer residency program with the playwright [...]

Synopsis: Spiders have often been a source of humansâ  deepest nightmares.  However, in Carrie’s Web they may actually save the day!  A young South Asian woman struggles to untangle herself from cultural and familial webs.  She looks for empowerment to stop cycle of violence only to find help from an extremely unlikely source.  A [...]

Synopsis: Sarah, a suburban housewife, befriends her gay neighbor Mike when he loses his longtime companion in a motorcycle accident. The two form a strange bond when Mike learns that Sarahâ s first husband was also killed in a car accident. They spend their nights mourning their lost loves in their own unique way until [...]

Synopsis: The play is about the continuous fight that each one of us has to go through for our physical and emotional survival, especially for those of us who are the first generation immigrants to USA. The wars we fight are not always just and fair but we still need to fight them anyway.
Ron (Ronobir) [...]

Synopsis: Oblivious to theory, two otherwise unoccupied men construct and deconstruct the Apocalypse inside their apartment.
Setting: A  bare Los Angeles apartment
Time Period: any time/contemporary
Cast Size: 2
Casting: Douglas, a man about thirty three.
Theodore, a man also about thirty three.
Design Needs: The set is a spare, non-realistic, an impression of a place. It is a single room, [...]

Synopsis: The Moral Implications of Time Travel takes place in the early nineties, on the semi-rural/suburban outskirts of Detroit where Anil Das, an Indian immigrant to America now in his sixties, lives with Pranav, his thirty year old son who has never moved out.
       At the outset of the play, Anil announces that [...]

Synopsis: Presented in a fractured form, Jetlag unfolds as mystery that explores the psychological effect of emotional longing, dislocations of time and space that are both literal and metaphoric, and the events and influence of people in our lives that result in our failure or success. In the center of the play is a love [...]

Synopsis: This collection of one acts are generally comedic and philosophical in their nature.  A few are short and lighthearted such as A Play for my Dentist, a ten-minute which traces the (sweet but not saccharine) emotional relationship between two dentists of different ethnicities through their research and collaboration in dentistry. Others are bit more [...]