Alter Ego Productions is a non-profit group focusing on modern Indo-American Theater with a universal message. The theatre company is comprised of full-time professionals who live in New York and have a passion for theatre.

The company was started in the summer of 2002 in New York City by Bhavna Thakur, Sipi Bhandari, and Nilay Oza. For a long time it was felt that there was a lacuna in the South Asian diaspora with respect to the performing arts, especially theater. Bhavna Thakur and Sipi Bhandari are transaction lawyers and Nilay Oza is a practising architect, with a passion for theater that began in school and college in India. The core group was joined by other working professionals also interested in theater. The group comprises of lawyers, bankers, brokers, software engineers, doctors, and professors, amongst other professionals. Most of Alter Ego's productions are Equity Showcase and are typically staged off-off Broadway.

The first play that Alter Ego produced in the summer of 2002 was Hayavadhana or The Talking Horse, written by well known Indian playwright Girish Karnad. The play is centered around the philosophical question of whether an individual's identity is derived from the head or the body, and raises issues of perfection and imperfection, of contentment and dissatisfaction. A plot and sub-plot that intertwine to explore the tricky questions of identity and the nature of reality; the clever incorporation of motifs from traditional theatre; Yakshagana, a play within a play, dolls, masks; the irreverent inversion of mock-heroic mores.

Their second production Chaos Theory in winter 2002 was written by New York based playwright, Anuvab Pal. A play that explores the imperfect physics of love. An original play, Chaos Theory explores the interplay between the unsolvable equations that the world of physics presents with the absurd challenges created by a world of unrequited love. It traces the seemingly random connections and events which shape the lives of two professors who feel more for each other than the laws of physics can express.

Alter Ego's most ambitious production to date is Indian Ink written by Tom Stoppard, a giant in the world of theater, and the playwright of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, amongst many other plays and screenplays including Shakespeare in Love. The play, lyrically shifts between pre-independence 1930's India and the 1980's Britain of Margaret Thatcher, Indian Ink depicts a timeless love affair set against the backdrop of one of the most significant moments in history - the emergence of the Indian subcontinent from the grip of the British Empire.

Although Indian Ink represents one of Stoppard's lesser known plays and has little of his characteristic brilliant word play and verbal jousting, it represents an important aspect of Stoppard's life, an acknowledgment to the country he spent a number of years growing up as a boy in the 1940's before moving with his family to England. The character of Flora Crewe is based on actress Felicity Kendal, who Stoppard had a longstanding relationship with.

Alter Ego's production of Indian Ink was Tom Stoppard's New York premiere of that play. It ran to packed houses at the Walker Space theater in Tribeca and was hailed by Theatermania as one of the best plays of 2003 that was probably missed by most theatergoers.

Anuvab Pal's play Fatwa, was the next production by Alter Ego and selected for the 2004 New York Fringe Festival. Fatwa is a comedy about two elderly men who try to take advantage of the current American political climate to fulfill lifelong artistic desires. Both men have famous names, but are not famous themselves. They are failed writers who in attempting to promote a blasphemous novel engineer a fake fatwa, religious death edict, that result in a startling outcome to this comic play.

Alter Ego's present production, First Class Man is written by David Freeman and is based on the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician with an almost spiritual ability to derive complex mathematical formulas without formal proof, and his unlikely friendship with GH Hardy, the famous Cambridge University mathematician, who recognized Ramanujan's peculiar genius and brings him over to England. The play is to be staged in October 2006.

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Productions

First Class Man, by David Freeman in October 2006

Fatwa, by Anuvab Pal in 2004

Indian Ink, by Tom Stoppard in 2003

Chaos Theory, by Anuvab Pal in 2002

Hayavadhana, by Girish Karnad in 2002

External links

Alter Ego Productions Website

Upcoming Production of First Class Man by David Freeman