S2 Ep 22: Playwright, director and slam poet Shivani Tibrewala on how to create subtext in theater

Cutting Chai Stories: Write copy that feels good

Hello and welcome to the last episode of Season 2 of Cutting Chai Stories! I'm your host Jayati Vora and on today's show, I speak to playwright and director Shivani Tibrewala, of No License Yet productions, who explains the peculiar tension between dialogue and subtext in theater, and how to create it. She reads an excerpt of her monologue, Avoid the Void. And she recalls her part in the nascent slam poetry scene in Mumbai.

To contact Shivani, you can email [e-mail]

About Shivani:

Shivani Tibrewala is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter from Mumbai, India and an empaneled artist with the Indian Council of Cultural Relations. She is the founder-director of No License Yet, a theatre company known for producing socially relevant pieces of theatre such as Retellings (a feminist interpretation of the Ramayana), and has herself written, directed and produced 10 plays since 2002 starring some of the biggest names in the Indian performing arts such as Tom Alter, Mrinalini Sarabhai, Mallika Sarabhai, Preeta Mathur, Utkarsh Mazumdar, Meenal Patel, Mona Ambegaonkar, Denzil Smith, Quasar Thakore Padamsee, Avantika Akerkar etc. Her plays has been published by Writers Workshop India, on Muse India and in a Croatian anthology featuring works by Women Writers from India. She has been commissioned to write plays by Theatre Royal Plymouth (UK), Flinntheater (Germany), The Moving Image Factory (Canary), etc. and her plays have traveled far and wide both in India and abroad and have completed over 500 shows. She has written for various television series including the kids daily "Hello Dolly" based on The Princess Diaries, and a few feature films, including a comic musical for kids called "Music School" (based on The Sound of Music) the music for which is currently being composed by the maestro Ilaiyaraaja, a biopic on the life of Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw currently being produced by Ronnie Screwvala, a medical thriller based on her critically acclaimed play "The Laboratory" which was shortlisted by Sundance, a horror film called "Sex on the Beach" that was one of the ten stories in the feature "Dus Kahaniyaan" produced by Whitefeather Films, and numerous other screenplays she is currently pitching to producers.