Perhaps a week too late, but the motif of the two short plays being staged this weekend is love, or rather aspects of love.
The first play, Nothing Will Happen Between Us, is written by 21- year-old Abhishek Bhattacharya, about an unpoken love story set in Delhi University that takes place in a bookstore.
Theatre director Feisal Alkazi saw great potential in Bhattacharya’s script when he saw the play for the first time as a judge. “It’s interesting to see young writers are trying to explore changing India.” Nothing Will Happen Between Us was first staged last year.
The other is a more celebrated play, Tea, by Japanese-American playwright and poet, Velina Hasu Houston. It is a story about the tales of five Japanese housewives who married American soldiers post World War II and settled in America.
According to Alkazi, in the aftermath of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some ten thousand Japanese women married American soldiers and shifted base. “The story is about the clash of cultures that these women face,” he says. “It’s a poignant story which deals with love and migration, a universal theme.”