\u201cIt’s an eye opener for men in the audience about their chauvinistic behavior. It’s also empowering for the cast as well as women in the audience,\u201d director Subrata Das writes. \u201cIt is about giving women the opportunity to take on roles that were created for male actors holding aggressive, destructive, and violent characteristics. Male-chauvinism performed by women will bring to the audience’s attention the unspeakable male behavior that is often accepted as a norm in Indian society.\u201d<\/p>\n Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n SETU\u2014which the community theater troupe says means “bridge” in several Indian languages\u2014aims to build bridges between Indian and Western cultures through theater. Recent performances of ancient epics and contemporary plays have been done with an eye toward thinking about empowering women and contemplating equality.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Fire and the Rain\u201d is a sort of soap opera about a priestly family when a fire-sacrifice is being arranged by a king to beseech a god of rain to end years of famine and drought. The priestly patriarch is passed over for the major post of leading the ritual when his older son is appointed instead. While the son is busy with his new job, his wife has an affair with an old flame, his cousin, and his father rapes her. Meanwhile, a younger brother, bound by family duty and pride, pines for a woman whom he feels he can\u2019t be with because she\u2019s in a lower caste.<\/p>\n \u201cThe male characters are using women just for their pleasure, using them as a stepping stone, using them only when they need them for their physical desires, for revenge, and abandoning them when their purpose is served,\u201d says Yogita Miharia, who plays the older brother and chief priest of the fire sacrifice. \u201cThese things are more acceptable when men do them. When women do it, it\u2019s completely different. \u2026 When a woman shows their rage or their lust or their desire, it\u2019s a little difficult to accept.\u201d<\/p>\n Having women perform all the roles highlights \u201chow male chauvinism works and all these violent emotions,\u201d says Jayanti Bandyopadhyay, who co-founded the company with director Subrata Das in 2003. \u201cHow does it feel because women are stating it now?\u201d<\/p>\n Photos copyright 2018 Greg Cook.<\/em><\/p>\n Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n What happens when you take India\u2019s two-millennia-old epic the \u201cMahabharata\u201d and retell it with an all-female cast? That\u2019s the experiment Stage Ensemble Theater Unit (SETU) explores in its performances at Belmont Town Hall this weekend of Girish Karnad’s 1995 play \u201cThe Fire and the Rain.\u201d The script is inspired by and elaborates on the ancient […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7081,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,110],"tags":[345,98,443,344,343],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7074"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7074"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7091,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7074\/revisions\/7091"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Stage](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/picSETUFireRain180426_0566w-1024x683.jpg\")
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