I am a playwright with a passion for bilingual storytelling, a proclivity towards interdisciplinary performance, and a penchant for the hyper-theatrical. I write bilingual plays about characters navigating major moments of transition, whether that’s moving to a new country, looking at colleges with your teenager, or thinking about having kids for the first time. My plays flirt heavily with spectacle. I center South/Southeast Asian characters, immigrant narratives, and neocolonial themes. And I am preoccupied with the thread of lineage that connects us to both our ancestors and our descendants. I hope to make theatre as concerned with community as it is with content, as formally inventive as it is rigorous, and as joyful as it is unafraid to engage with hard questions.

I make work for multilingual, intergenerational, culturally expansive audiences. I love watching audiences with different language fluencies accept or reject their differences in space together. I love watching Hindi/Urdu speaking audience members translate my scenes for their neighbors, and how that act of audience intra-action inherently becomes part of the performance. My favorite plays are those that embrace the simple fact that every audience member will arrive differently, and don’t try to homogenize the conversation the play could have with each individual.

I am guided by the South Asian tradition of Kathak, which historically does not distinguish between dance and drama as separate disciplines, treating them instead as a unified form for performance-based storytelling. I am a dedicated Kathak student now, learning both theory and practice and I am bringing that training more deeply into my playwriting practice. Oral storytelling also deeply informs the way I make plays – the way my Nani and Dadi told the same stories hundreds of times, but made them equally thrilling each time. The same rhythms or rhymes, or new permutations coming from our own inside jokes around a particular story. This skill is as old as time, and it is a style I gravitate towards in my writing. My greatest artistic endeavor is discovering the synthesis between my South Asian heritage and my western training. I love telling stories with movement and poetry and a rhythm that feels intimate and personal like a Kathak performance or the foot of your grandmother’s bed.

My writing is highly theatrical and design focused; I am concerned with how the physical and aural world of a play is telling the story from the very beginning of my process. And I want to use every tool available to build live magic – a kind of total theatre that is maximalist in its approach, like a lot of South Asian art. When I’m writing a new play, especially the stage directions or the text of the title page, I think of the script as a series of invitations to my future collaborators. How am I inviting artists to the process of telling this story? Because the greatest gift I’ve felt as a playwright is witnessing collaborators pour their artistry into making my words and my worlds come to fruition. It is deeply humbling and inspiring. So I am always asking myself how to make the invitation better, clearer, more exciting for the recipient so that they feel energized to participate in the play making process to come.

I want to make art the way I do life – fully South Asian and fully American, with people who work as I work – in multiple storytelling traditions at once, for people who live as I live – in several languages and cultures all together.