The jolly looking fellow is the Messenger of Death

 

 

 

on the set of Maniben.com with Smriti

Shibani, offered to take Gail Nyoka of Toronto and me around Mumbai. After we checked out the aptly named FabIndia and Ghandi's cooperative, Khadi, with its beautiful hand woven silks and cottons and wonderfully smelling skin products-all for the benefit of the villagers who make the products- we drove very far north (in the 1600's Mumbai was a string of islands that have since been consolidated with land fills and bridges) where all the Bollywood and TV studios are. Shibani's daughter, Smriti Irani, is one of Indian TV's top stars, though we didn't learn this until after we had visited her on the set. They were shooting her current serial, Maniben.com, when we arrived- a family comedy about a village woman who comes to the city but tries to keep her traditional ways. The show was adapted from a play that Smriti starred in. Before this, Smriti was a hit in her previous serial that was especially popular in Afghanistan, so popular in fact that one night while an Afghan family was glued to the set, they were robbed and the thieves wrote in big letters on the walls around the house, THANK YOU, SMRITI!" When Smriti is done shooting she heads to the theater where's she's appearing in a new play that she has also produced.

Performers from MAHARASHTRA

 

 

 

 

Jeannie Haughton and cast; Vanisa Adams Haris in Who Will Sing For Lena?

 

 

plays plays plays

More than 60 international plays were presented over the week with ten readings a day so it was difficult to choose. Here's a very small sample: Salute the Man by Jeannie Haughton of Melbourne, takes place during the early settlement of Austrailia. The alleged disappearance of a white woman causes the settlers to murder many aboriginals in their search for the missing woman. Finally found, "she" is discovered to be the prow of a ship that has crashed on the rocks! Who Will Sing For Lena? by Janice Liddel of the US is about the first woman executed for murder, an African American woman who has killed her abuser in self-defense terrifically acted by Vanisa Adams Haris, also of US. Another play was about a white woman scape-goated in Rwanda. Many plays were about race and ethnicity. There was a play about Indian prostitutes and transvestites written and acted by the prostitutes themselves- they have formed their own theater company!

Unlike most of the internationals, I stayed in a guest house on campus and across the hall from me occupying thee same size room that I had to myself, were 10 members of a traditional folk group from Maharashtra who were there to perform the ten incarnations of Krishna-it's hard for me to keep all the Indian gods straight but I think Krishna is also Shiva.

Ripali, Niru, and Nilam

 

Ripali, Niru, Ripali and Ameera