The new voice of our time

A couple of weeks back our local cultural association Sanskriti organized its fourth Natyomela - a Theater festival. Our group ENAD could not participate in the festival this time. However, this year Sanskriti introduced a slot for an "outside" group. That outside group was ECTA from New Jersey. They brought a new play Taconic Parkway, written and directed by Sudipta Bhowmik.

Sudipta Bhowmik was somewhat known to the bay-area theater aficionados. He is operating in Bengali theater scene in north America for a while now. He is quite well-known especially in the east-coast circuit. For some reason, he never got a chance to bring his play to the west coast before. We, at EAND, were happy to do Ron - our last production - which was his play. I think that was the first exposure people got to Sudipta Bhowmik's work here in the bay area.

This time he also directed his three-cast play Taconic Parkway. It's a very powerful play. It may not put you in an internal conflict that Ron might have, but this play may well put you in a spell. He has masterfully woven an unusual story in a non-histrionic way. (That is, if you take the negative connotation of histrionics.) I will go out on limbs and say that Sudipta Bhowmik is producing some of the most powerful and important Bengali plays of our time. That includes Kolkata and West Bengal. (I am not very conversant with Dhaka's, or Bangladesh as a whole, contemporary plays, mostly due to accessibility problem.) More importantly, he is providing a glimpse to the actual USA-residing Bengalees. This is not the picture you get in mainstream magazines and mundane media portrayal.

Someday, I hope to write a more studied observation of his plays through more minute reading, but as a somewhat informed audience I can only appreciate his work. He is definitely blessed with some very competent actors. I am sure that helps him not only to mount a good play as a director, but also as a playwright since he can experiment with his characters. But still, the bottom line remains that he is writing some worthwhile plays of our time.

Thank you Sudiptada. Thank you for the plays.

After a hiatus

I just finished directing a play by Sudipta Bhawmik called Ron. It's a very relevant story of our time waited to be told. Sudiptada has weaved a magic spell of contemporary tale on an age-old philosophical conflict between the need to fight some wars and the principled position of anti-war. This not only looks at the current time, it does so from the first generation and second generation immigrants' perspective.

After the play there was a short Q&A session with the playwright where he said that the play is definitely anti-war. But I am positive nobody can call it propagandist. I actually found it to be well-balanced and portrays the viewpoint of a soldier and his family's perspective in a very touching way.

After being involved with immigrant Bengali community theater for about 7-8 years, what I find most challenging is to capture the imagination of the community. The issues, the problems, the dreams, the hopes, the frustrations, the achievements of the first generation immigrants are different from the folks back home. Yes, this is true that the first generation, especially we the Bengalis, do enjoy living in a bubble of nostalgia when it comes to culture. We prefer Rabindrasangeet over classic Jazz, Bhimsen Joshi over George Gershwin, Kishore Kumar over Norah Jones. We prefer to go and see the current crops of group theater when we visit Kolkata, but seldom make attempts to see the local repertory theater's productions. However, we do live our lives outside that bubble and constantly get challenged by a different world than what we used to face back home. Our theater should capture that.

In Ron, I thought, Sudiptada could strike the golden balance there where he could evoke a sense of nostalgia within the realm of our everyday existence. Our third production Chhenra Collage also struck that balance, it seems. Even after our tenth production some of the regular audience still refer to the third production. I may have some conjectures as to why this is happening, but cannot really tell for sure. But one thing is for sure, I like to continue doing this kind of theater where we can introspect our contemporary lives with compassion and humor.