37th Season 2002-2003

Queen of the Remote Control

By Sujata G. Bhatt

Co-Directed by Sujata G. Bhatt and Tim Dang

Set Designer Akeime Mitterlehner

Costume Designer Dori Quan

Lighting Designer Jose Lopez

Sound Designer Nathan Wang

Stage Manager Victoria A. Gathe

WORLD PREMIERE

Previews: September 5 - 7, 2002

Opening Date: September 11, 2002

This serio-comedy about an upper middle class South Asian American family in Calabasas is seen through the eyes of the protagonist, Shilpa Shah, a 17-year old longing to break out of the Valley and get to New York. But her parents, brother, and sister-in-law-to-be are the roadblocks she first has to bypass.  Her point of view makes her father (Ashok), mother (Divya), and older brother (Nitin) look like extreme parodies of the bourgeois – upwardly mobile and very happy that their son is about to marry the sister (Padma) of an Internet billionaire, and that the young couple are both quite frank about the business advantages of their marriage. A black comedy, QUEEN OF THE REMOTE CONTROL peers into one week in the lives of an immigrant Indian family to plumb the basic question of ethics: what does it really mean to live a good life? The play takes place during the fizziness of the Silicon Valley Bubble Year: 1999, just before the NASDAQ crashed and the Brave New World of the Internet Revolution flattened into the Layoff Land of today.

Cast

Poorna Jagannathan, Sulekha Naidu, Kal Penn, Meera Simhan, and Bernard White