Dance Like a Man: A Stage play in two
Jairaj and Ratna Parekh are ageing Bharatnatyam dancers, scrambling to find a mridangam player to accompany their daughter Lata at a prestigious dance festival. Lata, meanwhile, is bracing herself for something altogether more nerve-wracking: introducing her parents to Viswas, the man she hopes to marry. What begins as a tense family gathering quietly unravels into something far more raw. Old wounds resurface, long-buried grievances erupt, and the battles between Jairaj and Ratna drag the past kicking and screaming into the present. Their history, it turns out, carries a tragedy that has quietly poisoned everything around it. The younger pair have their own pressures to navigate. The two families are a conspicuous mismatch, Lata's future as a dancer hangs uncertainly over any talk of marriage, and at the centre of it all sits Lata herself, caught between honouring her parents' ambitions and honouring her own life. Mahesh Dattani writes with real psychological sharpness here. He frames the tension between duty and individual desire not as a simple argument, but as something lived, inherited, and stubbornly unresolved. It's a perceptive, quietly unsettling piece of theatre that rewards close attention.
- Author: Dattani Mahesh
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Design & Fashion
- ISBN: 978-0143062080
- Pages: 80 pages