Off-Kendrik is organizing the fifth SAATh theater festival September 18–20th, 2026 at the Mosesian Center for the Arts, Watertown.
SAATh is a celebration of coming together of diverse communities in South Asia and beyond through theater and story-telling. As the world around us gets more challenging and complex, Off-Kendrik has realized the necessity of creating a platform for opening dialogues and building partnerships between communities.
Scroll below to learn more about the plays this year. More information will be coming soon!
Bengali Plays
Bottoms Up
Spotlight, Columbus OH
1hr
Tringsha Shatabdi
Off-Kendrik, Boston
1hr30
Hindi Plays
Modern Love Jaisa
Spotlight, Columbus OH
Writ./Dir. Jayati Banerjee
Modern Love Jaisa is a tapestry of entwined stories — of romance, of relationships, of friendships — each thread pulling softly at the others until they form the mysterious, fragile web we call love. Set against the intimate backdrop of a cafe in a Boston suburb, the play becomes a mirror and a voyage, asking not only who we love, but why we love, and what, in the end, love makes of us.
1hr
Aadhi Raat Ke Baad
Mandi Theater, Chicago IL
Playwright: Shankar Shesh
Director: Alka Sharmaanerjee
Shankar Shesh was an unstoppable writer, producing his major plays within an intense span of roughly 12 years. His plays are heavily character-driven and tackle systemic oppression, casteism, and the dehumanization of society. Aadhi Raat Ke Baad is a thought-provoking drama that unfolds over the course of a single night. The play explores human psychology, morality, and hidden truths as three characters confront a situation that challenges their beliefs and values. Through sharp dialogue and emotional tension, the story gradually reveals layers of deception, guilt, and self-realization, leading to a compelling and introspective climax.
1hr30
English Plays
Sakharam Binder
Epic Actors’ Workshop, New Jersey
Playwright: Vijay Tendulkar
Director: Prof. Farley Richmond
Sakharam Binder, the protagonist, thinks he has the system by the tail and he can disregard the culture & societal values as long as he is truthful. That system is the de facto enslavement of women in postcolonial India, despite the promises of democracy and modernity. Sakharam, a bookbinder, picks up other men’s discarded women—castoff wives who would otherwise be homeless, destitute or murdered with impunity, and takes them in as domestic servants and sex partners. He rules his home like a tin-pot tyrant, yet each woman is told that she is free to leave whenever she likes. He will even give her a sari, 50 rupees and a ticket to wherever she wants to go. Everything good and proper, where Sakharam Binder is concerned, he says. He’s no husband to forget common decency. What he does not anticipate are the moral and emotional complications of the arrangement, which prove heartbreakingly ruinous to everyone involved.
1hr30
American Bhoot
Colab, New Jersey
American Bhoot is a verbatim theatre piece that brings to life the true story of a South Asian woman navigating homelessness and survival in New Jersey. This is an exploration of resilience, identity, and systemic injustice.
45min
Malayalam Play
Thaniyavarthanam
Writ./Dir. Dheeraj Prasad & Cini Murali K
The Source
In a crumbling tharavad in rural Kerala, one family lives under the grip of a curse — or so they believe. Generations ago, an ancestor desecrated the family deity, and since then, one person in every generation is said to descend into madness. When the latest "cursed" family member dies chained in a dark room, the village turns its gaze to the next generation: Balan, a quiet, well-liked schoolteacher, and his younger brother Gopi.
One nightmare is all it takes. Balan wakes the household screaming in the night, and the machinery of superstition clicks into motion. The family matriarch — the eldest and most powerful figure in this matrilineal household — sees confirmation of the curse. The village agrees. Every ordinary gesture Balan makes is reread as evidence of insanity. His students mock him. His wife and children are sent away. His sister's marriage is arranged in secret, lest the family's shame become public.
Gopi, educated and rational, fights back. He takes Balan to a doctor, who declares him perfectly sane. But a medical certificate is no match for collective belief. The matriarch — who genuinely loves Balan, who raised him, who holds the family together with an iron will forged from grief and tradition — cannot accept the doctor's word. To do so would mean dismantling the very structure of meaning that has governed her life and her mother's life before her. The curse must be real, because if it isn't, then the suffering of every "mad" relative before Balan was pointless.
Balan is committed to an asylum. He returns broken — physically, spiritually — and is confined to the same dark room, the same chains. The cycle completes. His mother, unable to watch her son live as a caged animal, poisons his final meal and then takes her own life.
The Adaptation
The original 1987 film placed the Karanavar — the eldest uncle — as the seat of family authority. In this stage adaptation, that role is reimagined as a woman: the family matriarch. In Kerala's matrilineal tradition, property and lineage pass through the mother's line, yet historically, power was still wielded by men. This adaptation corrects that contradiction and, in doing so, deepens it. The matriarch is not a villain. She is a woman who has survived by believing in the system that also imprisoned her. Her authority — hard-won, fragile, rooted in ritual — becomes the very instrument of Balan's destruction. The play asks: what happens when the person most capable of breaking a cycle is also the one most invested in its continuation?
Thaniyavarthanam is a story about how communities manufacture madness, how love and cruelty coexist in the same hand, and how superstition survives not because people are ignorant, but because abandoning it would cost them everything they've built their identity upon.
1hr30
Marathi Play
Aranyak
NatyaDarpan, Boston MA
Writer: Laxman Londhe
Director: Rucha Londhe
In a crumbling tharavad in rural Kerala, one family lives under the grip of a curse — or so they believe. Generations ago, an ancestor desecrated the family deity, and since then, one person in every generation is said to descend into madness. When the latest "cursed" family member dies chained in a dark room, the village turns its gaze to the next generation: Balan, a quiet, well-liked schoolteacher, and his younger brother Gopi.
One nightmare is all it takes. Balan wakes the household screaming in the night, and the machinery of superstition clicks into motion. The family matriarch — the eldest and most powerful figure in this matrilineal household — sees confirmation of the curse. The village agrees. Every ordinary gesture Balan makes is reread as evidence of insanity. His students mock him. His wife and children are sent away. His sister's marriage is arranged in secret, lest the family's shame become public.
Gopi, educated and rational, fights back. He takes Balan to a doctor, who declares him perfectly sane. But a medical certificate is no match for collective belief. The matriarch — who genuinely loves Balan, who raised him, who holds the family together with an iron will forged from grief and tradition — cannot accept the doctor's word. To do so would mean dismantling the very structure of meaning that has governed her life and her mother's life before her. The curse must be real, because if it isn't, then the suffering of every "mad" relative before Balan was pointless.
Balan is committed to an asylum. He returns broken — physically, spiritually — and is confined to the same dark room, the same chains. The cycle completes. His mother, unable to watch her son live as a caged animal, poisons his final meal and then takes her own life.