E-Mail This Article to a Friend Passage to India Examining same-sex love in South Asia BY ELLEN PFEIFER
	Gehri Dosti: Five Short Playswith a South Asian Bent Written and directed by Paul Knox. Choreography by Nadita Dinesh, with Sudarshan Belsare. Lighting by Thomas M.J. Callahan. Sound by Matthew O’Malley. With Sudarshan Belsare, Rupak Bhattacharya, Zehra Fazal, Anjali Khurana, Nitin Puri, Anita Raghuwanshi, Donald Ringuette, Weerawat Runguphan, and Fred Smith Jr. Produced by Naresh Ramarajan, the Harvard South Asian Association, and the Harvard BGLTSA. At Leverett Old Library Theater through November 15.

Gehri Dosti is the offspring of Paul Knox’s two passions: his work as executive director of New York’s Circle East theater and his advocacy for gay rights and HIV/AIDS education and prevention in India. The five short plays that make up the work have been workshopped and performed in New York and as far away as Cape Town. But the production now at Harvard’s Leverett Old Library Theater marks the first time all five have been performed together.

Based on the true stories of people Knox interviewed in South Asia, the plays display a surprising range of settings and styles while treating such topics as cross-cultural dissonance, violence against women, same-sex marriage, the ravages of AIDS, and the veil of secrecy that cloaks and chokes homosexual and lesbian existence in the subcontinent. Although Knox’s work is animated by insight and compassion, on the evidence of this production, his feelings about the subject are more advanced than his writing and his directing. The first two plays, Loving Japamala and Eating Jain, are poignant; the others err on the side of pretentiousness, melodrama, and sophomoric humor. Most of the actors, moreover, do not enunciate their words clearly. Whether it’s their South Asian accents or their inability to project, they make it impossible for the listener to comprehend more than about half of the text.

Loving Japamala is a gentle and touching confrontation between a young Indian nun and an American volunteer at a South Bronx soup kitchen run by the Missionaries of Charity. Sister Japamala (Anjali Khurana) is about to return to India — a transfer she’s requested to solve a "problem" she’s having in New York. She’s has developed a terrible crush on Tommy (Fred Smith Jr.), though he is sweetly ignorant of the obvious. Any relationship would be made impossible by her vows and, as we learn, by his homosexuality. But when he tells her he is "gay," she misunderstands and offers her farewells in a tender spirit of self-sacrifice. Khurana is charming as Sister, blending shyness, innocence, and urgent affection. Smith is equally appealing as he comes to understand her feelings.

Eating Jain takes place on an Indian night train en route from Kolkata to Puri. Sharing a berth are Mahvi (Sudarshan Belsare) and Bobby (Donald Ringuette). Bobby has traveled 6000 miles from the United States to see the young Indian businessman he fell in love with more than a year earlier. So infatuated is he that he’s adopted some of the strict dietary rules and nonviolent attitudes that are a feature of Jainism, the offshoot of Hinduism practiced by Mahvi. Mahvi returns Bobby’s love, but at the end of the train ride, he’ll return to his closeted life. Indeed, his parents have arranged a marriage for him, and he will not disappoint them. The play ends with both men anguished at losing each other.

In staging this segment, Knox shows considerable skill at choreographing the men’s nude bodies so that genitalia are teasingly hidden at all times — whether by blankets, sarongs, or strategic tumblings on the bed. The drama might have been even more affecting had he concentrated instead on Belsare’s diction.

I Am Mou is a mannered, expressionistic drama about a betrayed husband, his wife, and the governess who introduces her mistress to a love and life she never contemplated. Although there’s a fine, heated performance by Zehra Fazal as the wife, the play comes to seem melodramatic and one-sided. As the governess, Anita Raghuwanshi looks juicy but doesn’t project.

Two Men in Shoulder Stand brings us Hasan (Weerawat Runguphan) and Sarath (Nitin Puri), identically clad in black exercise clothes and practicing yoga stances. One is healthy and the other has AIDS. There isn’t much to be done for the AIDS sufferer, but his friend tries to help through "opening the channels" with yoga. However, it is his love, as well as the yoga, that allows the victim a moment of transcendence.

Tara Tara Didi unites the ensemble in a fantastical, farcical, rhymed, uh . . . fairy tale in which mismatched lovers are rearranged according to more suitable same-sex preferences. Knox has overreached here: the rhymes and the humor remain on the frat-house level, and so do the actors (mostly college students themselves), who cavort exuberantly in drag. Once again Zehra Fazal shines, as a hilarious butch lesbian from New York.