Playwrights Humaira Ghilzai and Bridgette Dutta Portman (left to right) at the first rehearsal. With the world premiere of Pilgrimage at Golden Thread Productions and Z Space, Humaira Ghilzai is the first female playwright of Afghan descent to receive a professional production in the U.S.
Cover of the official digital playbill for the world premiere of Pilgrimage. Featuring layered silhouette artwork and bold typography, the design reflects the play’s themes of journey, sisterhood, and spiritual reckoning. The playbill documents the production’s creative team, cast, developmental history, and Golden Thread’s 2025 Season of Solidarity.
The Pillowman is a dark psychological drama centered on a writer interrogated about a series of murders that resemble the violent stories he has written. The play explores the relationship between storytelling and reality, examining themes of authorship, censorship, trauma, and the moral responsibility of the artist.Naatak’s production uses projection and visual storytelling to stage the writer’s fictional narratives alongside the unfolding action.
The play is set in a semi-fictional kingdom of India in the Middle Ages, before the Maurya period. A poor Brahmin (priestly caste) man's soul gets transported into the physical body of a king. The havoc that ensues, owing to the conflicts between the mind of a poor man and the body of a rich man, helps the play question social status, class, privilege, and cultural background.
A celebratory party dance is performed by the ensemble cast of Playing It Safe, a 2025 Bay Area desi household comedy set during a housewarming party in a prime local neighborhood. Presented at James Logan High School in Union City, the play uses the dynamics among friends, spouses, and colleagues to reveal the tensions, humor, and layered social negotiations of everyday South Asian diaspora life.
Two couples engage in classic, harmless gossip during an equally harmless housewarming party in Playing It Safe, a 2025 Bay Area desi household comedy set in a prime local neighborhood. Presented at James Logan High School in Union City, the play uses the dynamics among friends, spouses, and colleagues to reveal the tensions, humor, and layered social negotiations of everyday South Asian diaspora life.
This article from Scroll.in explores how Indian immigrants in U.S. tech companies navigate the “corporate speak” of Silicon Valley, highlighting cultural, linguistic and generational dynamics in diaspora work life.
Marking Badal Sircar's birth centennary, 'Shesh Nei' stages the tension between the middle class's complacency and the unending cycle of triumphs and dejections, orchestrated by unfulfilled expectations. The protagonist is blamed by many around him for not fulfilling their expectations and then each accuser stands trial, as well, for failing someone else.
Promotional poster for Panchakanya, written by Anindya Chakraborty and Sayoni Roy, reimagines five women from the Ramayana and Mahabharata: Mandodari, Ahalya, Tara, Kunti, and Draupadi. Traditionally invoked together in Sanskrit verse as figures of moral complexity, the “Panchakanyas” occupy distinctive and often paradoxical roles within South Asian epic literature. BAAT’s production approached these characters through five distinct performance styles, incorporating music and choreography to explore questions of power, gender, and moral ambiguity. Rather than retelling familiar episodes, the play reinterprets these figures within a contemporary theatrical framework, inviting audiences to reconsider inherited narratives from the epics
Prachi Singh is the Audience Engagement Editor at India Currents. She is a journalist and editor focused on community-centered, listening-first reporting and audience engagement. Her work explores social justice, culture, and civic life. Prachi previously worked in audience engagement at Bay City News and was a Dow Jones News Fund intern. She holds a journalism degree from USC, where she served as a multimedia journalist and managing editor at Annenberg Media.
Part of BAAT’s February 2025 Bengali-language double feature, Prodosh Theke Protush Porjonto, written by Anindya Chakraborty and directed by Tania Bhattacharya, is adapted from Surendra Verma’s acclaimed Hindi play Suraj Ki Antim Kiran se Suraj Ki Pehli Kiran Tak. Set in the 10th-century kingdom of Malla, the drama explores questions of power, duty, and moral responsibility through a series of events unfolding between sunset and dawn.
