Anthology of Contemporary Bengali Plays by Bratya Basu

Bratya Basu, is an Indian actor, stage director, playwright, film director, professor and a politician. Basu was West Bengal's minister for Education. As an acclaimed writer, he began his theatre career in 1996 with his first play Ashaleen and went on to write Aranyadeb, Shahar Yaar, Virus-M, Winkle-Twinkle, Ruddhasangeet, Chatushkon, and the internationally celebrated Hemlat - the Prince of Garanhata. He has also been awarded Gajendra Kumar Mitra-Sumathanath Ghosh Memorial Award 2018 for his contribution in Bengali Literature.

• PrefaceINTRODUCTIONSection 1: Poignant Challenges, Soulful Remorse -Love in the Times of Corona imagines a Kolkata overtaken by pandemic and wild animals as families, governments, and media fall apart. Penitence takes the audience back to Gautam Buddha’s Mahaparinirvana to examine the relationship between religion, violence, and ethics in its historical contexts with contemporary relevance.1. Love in Times of Corona2. The PenitenceSection 2: (In)visible Boundaries, (Un)democratic Choices - The Final Night re-imagines the Indian nationalist Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s final night in British India set within the tumultuous events of partition. The play revolves around emotional wounds between him and his daughter in the larger ethico-political imagination of leaving the injured nation to the newly created Pakistan. Creusa-The Queen is a Bengali play based on Greek mythology and follows Queen Creusa through a murderous plot and an unrelenting challenge to the gods and patriarchy within democracy in her pursuit of social justice.3. The Final Night4. Creusa, the QueenSection 3: Intimately Political, Politically Intimate - Blackhole follows Angshuman Banerjee’s crisis of sexual identity down a blackhole of absurdism, digital information overload, and knowledge-power knots that make up the struggle of self-fashioning in the digital age. Who? is a psychocomic thriller that puts contemporary Bengali life under a microscope and deftly moves through topics of misogyny, mental health, and cricket in an absurdist whodunit that spotlights the hypocrisy of the middle-class Indian family.5. Blackhole6. Who?AFTERWORD