Kolkata’s most up-and-coming English-language dramatist (admittedly within a minuscule pool), Ahon Gooptu, reiterated two of his earlier works in December-January. The first, Item, had inaugurated The Urban Theatre Project in 2024, which I had missed. The second, Seasons of Love, I had reviewed in its opening run in 2022 directed by Katy Lai Roy, but Gooptu revised it and Vikram Iyengar directed it this time, though to advertise this one as its “world premiere” by defining the previous versions as “in development” does injustice to its prior stage history. As Gooptu knows, all scripts under the same title remain in development until their last and final curtain call!
Item, virtually a solo performance by him, finds him metamorphosing from his upbringing in Kolkata to his college education in the US and outing into his drag persona as Zenia Fauxbia Darling. This pun on xenophobia raises Gooptu’s most serious theme, of American racism faced by him, but of course the entire “play” addresses the delicate subject of a boy/man who loves cross-dressing and instinctively feels heteronormativity as alien to him. Although he calls it an academic study performed and then fed back into his research on paper, don’t let that description intimidate! Quite eye-opening are his twin talents in dance and song, particularly his Bolly inspirations that hooked him as a schoolkid (he acknowledges thanks to Saroj Khan, Farah Khan, Zeenat, Rekha, Madhuri, Aishwarya, Kareena and many more). He opens up uninhibitedly in drag, but for less individual-centred acting, I encourage him to cultivate the voices and mannerisms of other characters in his text, like his relatives, friends and acquaintances abroad.
In terms of content, Seasons of Love 1.0 and 2.0 do not differ radically, so we should consider the latter as a revival. In fact, much of what I wrote about the original remains valid, which readers can refer to here; even though the script itself has improved, the core of love and loss—grandson in Chicago separated from grandmother and mother in Kolkata by distance as well as dementia—stays the same. Drawn by its “fragility and resilience of ties that bind … and … break”, Iyengar brings to the fore his own directorial forte, body-movement blocking, the long prelude of the three dramatis personae slow-twirling in point-counterpoint as if trapped in a cyclic limbo recalling his choreography in Ranan’s Crossings (2004). Jayati Chakraborty (she used a stage alias in the first edition) reprises the grandmother with greater maturity. Gooptu himself enacts the son, straddling his own personal grief and the objectivity demanded of a role. Indudipa Sinha portrays the mother with sensitivity, caught in between.
(25 January 2026)