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The Lives of Desi Women

Top to bottom: Kavita Bali works on the emotions in her lines. Radha examines a gift her brother has brought her from college. Photos by M.S. Deshmukh.

SF poet debuts play this weekend

By M.S. Deshmukh | Special to AsianWeek

This weekend, second generation South Asian women will be center stage in San Francisco, contemplating choices and struggling not to fall — metaphorically — that is, in Triptych: Stories of Desi Women at the Noh Space.

This theatrical debut by Summi Kaipa was the result of a grant from the Portrero Nuevo Fund, and the two shows on Jan. 24 and 25 are nearly sold out.

Kaipa, 27, has been living in San Francisco’s Mission district for the past three years and would identify herself as a poet, not a playwright. She has Charlie’s Angels hair and Christmas lights on her living room wall that spell out Bollywood. There’s even a poster of Bollywood star Ajay Devgan on the door to her apartment.

After spending her formative years in Arkansas, Kaipa studied at both UC Berkeley and the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous publications like In These Times, San Francisco Bay Guardian and Rain Taxi, and her chapbook, Epics, was published as part of the Leroy chapbook series. She was also the publisher/editor of Interlope, a magazine focusing on experimental writing by Asian Pacific Americans. Currently, she is writing memoirs that she describes as “not really memoirs — more poetic/autobiographical/phantasmagorical semi-fictional things.”

Over her time in San Francisco, Kaipa has worked on the boards of several arts foundations. For money and passion, she helps produce programs for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

Triptych, a fine arts term, describes a work made up of three somewhat connected panels — in the case of the play, each of the panels tells a story of a second-generation South Asian, or desi, woman facing issues of falling and contemplating choices made.

The show opens with actress Kavita Bali playing a corporate-climber type who enters into a disturbed monologue while waiting at the MacArthur Station for a Fremont train. Bali’s character, Laxshmi, is in her 30s and feeling very unfulfilled with the wealth and power she has amassed at the cost of any real intimacy with her parents and brother. The sensation, as Laxshmi puts it, is that of, “Getting there, without ever feeling like you’ve made it.”

Bali, local designer, filmmaker and editor of urbanpeacock.com, rants rather believably in this role, delivering her lines with a kind of lonely, choked-up, hopelessness that illuminates the character’s predicament well.

In the second scene, Sapna Gandhi is Kavatri, a blushing-bride-to-be who is reprimanded by her lifelong friend, Shaila, played by Mona Shah, while shopping for a wedding dress. The issue of contention between the young ladies is that Kavatri is selling out, taking a husband who is white and preppy, and aptly named Ken. Shaila tells us that Kavatri has always been the independent-minded artist of their group.

The answer, it turns out, is that, as Kavatri claims to believe, “Behind every great artist is a great benefactor.” Though, over the course of this scene, the advantage of marrying such a benefactor loses some of the charm and the bride-to-be wonders if she shouldn’t be getting married in a red silk Banarasi sari.

The last scene is perhaps the most emotionally charged, as Krishna, played by Amit Chadha, comes home from college to find his sister, Radha, played by Gopi Shastri, has turned very inwardly to religion to compensate for the recent loss of their mother. In this scene, Kaipa gives us a chance to see the falling in both brother and sister. While Krishna worries that his sister is dropping out of life, Radha worries that college allows her brother to escape what’s left of his family — a despondent father and a lonely sister.

Overall, the play is well-done. The writing is solid and director Vivian Giourousis, found on Craigslist, does a great job of getting coherent performances out of her first-time actors. The play has come together — mostly since the first week of January — with the help of writer, filmmaker and Kaipa’s long-time friend, Kirthi Nath as costume designer, and with the assistance of Kate Lorch. The set design features a series of projections to be displayed on the main characters, each in white.

Each of the actors embraces their role, so that the end product is a realistic series of scenes where we witness three different kinds of disillusionment. By starting with the 30-something woman and ending on the high school-aged girl, Kaipa explores the extended second-generation. The frustration is best articulated by the youngest.

“This country and this life, are so full of empty dreams — homecoming queen, starting quarterback, head cheerleader,” Shastri says as Radha. It is the emptiness of each character’s dreams that brings a kind of existential realism to the crisis in each scene, and it is Kaipa’s willingness to embrace all-things-Indian that offsets the drama and complicates the connection between panels. It is difficult to indict Radha for her turn to Hindu rituals, because hers is as much a choice born of possibility as anyone else’s, so instead, Kaipa has us contend with this extreme while processing the Barbie character and the unhappy capitalist.

In addition, the lobby will feature wonderful artwork by APA comic book artists Jason Shiga, Lark Pien and Thien Pham. This was Kaipa’s bid to incorporate her other love, comic art, into the grant project.

Triptych: Stories of Desi Women will play Jan. 24 and 25 at the Noh Space, 2840 Mariposa Street, San Francisco. The Gallery opens at 7:30 and the play begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $5 to $10, sliding scale. For information and reservations, please call 415-864-6740.