Exciting news: Beena wrote a play!
We don’t often see Indian women onstage, so Beena wrote a play she’s starring in this summer.
Issue #22
This is Beena Raghavendran, co-founder of Red, White and Brown Media. For the last year, I’ve been writing a one-woman play. I’m thrilled that I get to virtually perform my show, “Meera’s Kitchen,” at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival in June. It’s a story about food, about what people think, about mental health and about being Brown in the U.S. There are five performance slots, and all of them are virtual livestreams. I hope you buy a ticket (you can do so here).
Writing this play changed my life. I’m taking over the Red, White and Brown newsletter for the next month to share how my playwriting journey overlaps with my Indian American identity. It fits in nicely with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May — but if you’re a fan of this newsletter, you know Red, White and Brown believes in sharing stories about our community all year long!
My play is about a chef named Meera. She needs $5,000 to save her Indian restaurant from closure during the COVID pandemic. So Meera holds a live-streamed fundraiser to celebrate her culture and cooking — until a strangely familiar foe hijacks Meera’s sanity, and things take a dark turn.
I’ve wanted to write this play since summer 2019, when I saw Heidi Schreck’s play “What the Constitution Means to Me” on Broadway. Schreck’s show moved me. She wove together family stories with her real-life experience giving speeches on the Constitution to win college tuition money. I left the theater thinking, naively, “I could write a one-woman play about my life!” (I now laugh at that; playwriting is a huge challenge!) I ached to write about people like me, people I don’t often read about or see on stage or screen — the children of Indian immigrants who age into young adulthood, and our community’s wider stories of immigrant life. So I started by writing what I felt, and ended up creating Meera: a passionate, driven, troubled chef. She’s kind of like me, but she’s also her own beautiful, chaotic person.
Writing this play forced me to reckon with the status quo, with my mental health, with questions about my race, identity and culture that I’d reserved for my diary, with being good enough, with productivity, with grief and shame. And for most of this play’s existence, a pandemic raged on outside my apartment walls.
Though this is my story, I hope my findings will make you think, or laugh, or inspire you to try something you’ve always wanted to do. Until you hear from me next week, sending love to India, and wishing the country and its people a speedy recovery.
You can buy tickets to Meera’s Kitchen here.
Beena Raghavendran (@thebeenster)
Co-founder of Red, White and Brown Media
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