The Elephant in the Capital and Other Plays

This collection by one of India’s most original playwrights includes a play captioned “Waiting for the Bus” that was staged for more than five hundred nights throughout Odisha,and its Hindi translation was premiered by Prastav, New Delhi, directed by Rajnarayan Dixit. The play was taught in graduate course for twenty years in different universities (1968-1988) and earned the status of a modern classic. “The Last Rung of the Ladder” is the first experiment in converging Indian theatre performance mode with that of the American mode of ‘transformation plays’, “The Spider in Its Web” is a meta-theatrical experiment remotely connected to Pirandello, and “The Story of the Stormy Night” is the first neo-journalistic play of India.“The Elephant in the Capital” may be categorized as an absurd play emphasizing Foucauldian evils of “power”.