The idea for this play came from two source texts - Slawomir Mrozek's Polish play Striptease and Ghanshyam Desai's Gujarati short story 'Crowd'. Sometime in October 2020, I was talking to Sunil Shanbag and he mentioned the Hindi translation of Striptease by Ashok Mishra, which he had directed back in the 80s. Thanks to Sunil's priceless archives, he found the scanned copy of the handwritten text of the translation and emailed it across to me. I read the play again - this time in a language much familiar and closer to me; that was probably the first time that I actually understood the play in its entirety. About a week later, I decided to reread the short story 'Crowd' and a very different meaning emerged in this reading. Both these texts spoke to each other in uncanny ways and I was keen to explore that further as a theatre-maker. So, when I received the call to direct a play for the annual Ranga Shankara festival, it kind of fell in place and wanted to draw from both these texts and create something new out of it.
It has been a slow process for all of us, filled with doubts and questions, as creating something new is always messy and it is in clearing the mess that we often discover what we actually want to say. I find myself extremely fortunate to have found a creative team who were willing to commit to the idea. I am extremely grateful to Anmol Vellani for his time and inputs at the early stages of writing the play, which helped bring immense clarity from a conceptual and a formal point of view.