South Asian Theatre Festival celebrates 20 years

Editor’s note: Central Desi is moving into a summer schedule, publishing every other week until Labor Day. As we plan for next year’s fellowship and coverage plans, we’ll be resurfacing some of our best stories from the archives for you to enjoy.

There is a special name for people who choose to dedicate their lives to theater. There is a moniker designed for those who spend every spare hour planning, rehearsing and reworking a performance minute-by-minute. You can call them “show people.”

Show people often gravitate to one another. From June 13 to June 16, you could find them at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center (NBPAC) where they, along with family and friends, attended the 20th South Asian Theatre Festival. 

Here, attendees had the opportunity to watch 11 unique performances by South Asian artists based in New Jersey and internationally — all in the span of one weekend.

Most of these shows took place in the NBPAC’s Arthur Laurents Theater, an intimate space with a capacity of only around 250 people. 

As lights dimmed and actors took their marks, you could hear fellow audience members clear their throats and wriggle in their seats. At a festival where audiences and performers have known each other for years, this sort of intimacy is part of the experience. 

Anahita Mantri, an Edison resident attending the festival on June 14, was there to support her own theater group, with whom she has performed at the festival before.

“Today, I'm just here as an audience, enjoying and learning and watching,” she said. “I'm generally in the circuit, so I know about these festivals when they come around.”

Festival origins

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the festival, which has been a fixture of the local Desi theater scene since it was founded by Dipan Ray, president of Epic Actors’ Workshop. 

A pharmacist by training, Ray has always had a passion for theater — developed during his time in a Kolkata-based theater group with the same name in the 1970s.

After immigrating to New York in 1988, Ray formed an American chapter of the group and performed in showcases including the New York International Fringe Festival.

When Ray moved to New Jersey after 9/11 and found a largely absent Desi theater circuit, he decided to establish the South Asian Theatre Festival.

“When I moved to New Jersey in 2002, there was no other [theater] activity, so that was the encouragement for me to create a theater platform where I can bring South Asian theater groups under one roof,” he told Central Desi.

Theater as a passion

Two decades later, the festival still attracts South Asian artists from in and around New Jersey — many of whom have careers in other fields and volunteer the rest of their time to theater.

Ameeya Mehta is one such person. The son of thespian parents, Mehta grew up immersed in all things theater. Even after immigrating to the U.S. in 1995 to work in the country’s IT sector, he continued performing in local productions.

“Theater was always in my blood. It's my passion, “ he told Central Desi. “Of course, my primary profession is my IT work. All my evenings and weekends go to theater.”

In 2012, Mehta established a New Jersey branch of Prayog Theater Group, his parents’ theater company in India. Since then, the North Brunswick-based troupe has staged over 25 plays and 150 shows, including one earlier this month at the South Asian Theatre Festival.

On June 15, Prayog Theater Group put on a production of “Langdi Taang” directed by Mehta. The play is based on Hindi-language satirist Harishankar Parsai’s novel “Rani Nagfani Ki Kahani” and skewers government, bureaucracy and organized religion. 

“This satire is very relevant to date,” Mehta said. “It talks about how corruption plays a role in society, how some politicians play around with people, how some religious leaders manipulate people.”

For this particular production, the cast and crew had rehearsed for approximately three months, with many fitting in rehearsal time after work and on the weekends.

“We do rehearsals starting at 7 p.m. and we go up to 10 p.m. almost two or three days a week,” Mehta said. “So, you can see how much passion and time goes behind this production.”

This hard work paid off as Mehta told Central Desi after the performance that the show received an “amazing response” with audience members reaching out to him over the phone and on social media to show their appreciation.

East Brunswick-based ICS Theatre also received kudos from the audience after its production of the play “Final Solutions” on the festival’s second day.

Originally published in 1993, “Final Solutions” is an English-language play that explores interreligious conflict in India through the story of a Hindu family and two Muslim boys who shelter together in the midst of a communal riot. 

Through abstract devices like flashbacks to post-partition India and a nameless group of actors representing a mob from either community, the play interrogates historical trauma, selective memory and how prejudice takes a toll on personal relationships. 

Barkha Kishnani, associate director of the production, told Central Desi that the play does not offer the audience a simple resolution to these issues, instead “exposing the uneasy persistence of communal divisions.” 

Sharing lived experiences

While the festival’s performances ranged from campy homages to South Asian film to Desi twists on classic American theater, lived experience was a common thread among many of its shows.

One such production was “Who Lights the Stars,” written and performed by Monirah Hashemi and directed by Leif Persson. Part of a larger trilogy of works, “Who Lights the Stars” is a one-woman show focused on the memories and experiences of women living in Afghanistan across various time periods. 

“It's about conflict, oppression, war, silence, structural silence but also resilience and resistance,” Hashemi told Central Desi. “Especially in the context of Afghanistan, [what] does resilience and women's resistance look like there?”

Hashemi and Persson first participated in the South Asian Theatre Festival in 2015, putting on “The Sitaraha,” the first play in the trilogy. Ten years later, Hashemi said she could recognize audience members who had seen this first performance and were now able to see its second installment. 

“I know there are people here that have been following the work that Leif and I have been doing, so it's really amazing to be here despite all the stress and nervousness — to just be here and perform,” she told Central Desi.

Ultimately, Hashemi hopes the play will contribute to “freeing the narration of lived experience from the stigma the society imposes and the structure and the silence the state imposes.” 

Festival goers could see more performers’ lived experiences play out in “Theatre in Life,” a series of free abstract performances sprinkled across the festival’s three days.

Held for free in various spaces across NBPAC, including rehearsal rooms and outside the venue, “Theatre in Life” performances aim to make theater more accessible, performer Subhasis Das explains.

Das, an IT engineer by trade, has been staging these experimental performances at the festival since 2015. The shows are original and employ improvisation and abstract blocking to convey experiences.

“I take some of the actors who want to work with me and do workshops to [see] what current topics are bothering them [or what] they want to talk about,” Das told Central Desi. “And through the workshops, I bring their personal experience and from there, we build the script.”

Tandra Das, a “Theatre in Life” performer, told Central Desi after the group’s Saturday performance that she felt audiences connected to the lived experience they depicted. 

Through her performance, Das was able to explore events in her own life, specifically her experience becoming a U.S. citizen this past year.

In one show, Das’ character feels conflicted on whether she must agree to “bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law” as part of her citizenship process. 

“That was actually my story…. I was in a dilemma when I was reading through the questions… and I had to say yes to things which I really didn’t believe,” she said. “I do not like gun violence. I do not like war anywhere… but to get citizenship, I had to say yes to that.”

Next generation of theater

Reflecting on 20 years of the festival, Ray said he has begun looking to the future and hopes to keep the event going by bringing younger performers into the fold.

“I'll be getting older. I'll be losing energy. We have to look for our future generations…that way our culture can still survive from generations to generations,” he told Central Desi. 

Ray sees organizations like BangaNextGen, a Bengali American youth group that performed at this year’s festival for the first time, as part of this new generation. 

On June 13, BangaNextGen performed “Unbound,” a mime and dance show centered on women’s empowerment. To prepare, performers trained under Suvendu Mukhopadhyay, a mime artist and choreographer based in India. 

“The preparation for this performance has been intense but so rewarding,” performer Swayam Shuvra Chakraborty told Central Desi. “We’ve been working for four hours every morning for the past month, and this daily grind with the team has brought us all far closer together.”

For performer and BangaNextGen president Disari Bhattacharya, performing in the festival means being part of a greater conversation among the South Asian diaspora. 

“We see the festival as a vital space where the many voices and traditions of the South Asian diaspora come together,” she said. “We’re honored to be part of something that uplifts and amplifies South Asian stories in such a powerful way.”

Astha Lakhankar is a 2024-25 reporting fellow at Central Desi. She is a recent graduate of Rutgers University, where she worked as managing editor of the student-run newspaper, The Daily Targum.

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