November 09, 2004

Sakharam BinderTheater

Not really into Bombay Dreams? Well if you live in New York you may be in luck. Sakharam Binder is being staged by The Play Company. From Villagevoice.com:

How often do New York theatergoers get a chance to see a premier work from a major Indian dramatist, staged with the collaboration of the writer himself? Almost never. Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder was written and first performed in 1974 and hardly qualifies as a new play. Thirty years after setting Indian censors aflame, it makes its New York debut in a spare, lucid, and altogether thrilling production from the Play Company. At a time when the airheaded confection Bombay Dreams passes for subcontinental theater, Sakharam Binder not only feels vital, but painfully necessary.

Sounds interesting, but I don’t know the story really. What’s it about?

Sakharam is a fortyish bookbinder who offers lodging to cast-off women in exchange for housekeeping favors and the occasional fuck. The drama focuses on two of his concubines—the introverted and ultra-religious Laxmi (Anna George) and the arrogant and slutty Champa (Sarita Choudhury). Their sequential stories are told in highly diagrammatic fashion—Laxmi brings out the Fagin-ish slave master in Sakharam while the insatiable Champa reduces him to a lovelorn puppy.

Oohhh. Saucy.

Update: I had missed the fact that Sepia Mutiny has already covered this story in more detail here.

abhi on November 9, 2004 09:45 AM in Theater · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post