If the tumultuous ovation by the sellout audience here is any indication, the projected ten-city United Statestour of the play Mahatma vs Gandhi, directed by Feroz Khan, seems set for a resounding success.
With Naseeruddin Shah playing the role of the Mahatma, Neena Kulkarni as Kasturba and Kay Kay as their first-born son Hiralal, it was described by critics attending it as an almost flawless performance of international standards.
The audience reacted to it with repeated bursts of applause.
At curtain call, Khan not only had all his actors on the stage but also the behind-the-scene technicians, saying that it was entirely a team effort with everyone contributing equally.
Naseeruddin Shah made the Mahatma come alive on the stage, recapturing the slight stoop of the Bapus walk, his crosslegged crouch before his spinning wheel, even the very tone and timbre of his larger-than-life subjects voice.
Kulkarnis Kasturba was a woman of epic depth, torn between a mothers love for her first-born and a wifes unquestioning faith in the tenets of her husband. Kay Kays all-too-human Hiralal wrings our hearts, sometimes eclipsing in his frailty Naseeruddins stern Mahatma.
The present play in English is not the product of a single mans effort but the culmination of a process which began as a novel in Gujarati, Prakashno Padchhayo, by Dinkar Joshi. It was adopted by Ajit Dalvi and reworked into its present shape with Khan contributing to the script.
The debut of the play in India did not go unnoticed and its United States tour opened with a rare paean of praise in the Arts & Ideas section of The New York Times by the papers chief of India bureau John Burns.
A widely hailed stage production, Mahatma vs. Gandhi has broken the taboos and Americans have an opportunity to join in the debate it has unleashed about one of historys most famous figures, Burns wrote.
The play looks at Gandhi through the prism of his tortured relationship with the eldest of his four sons, Hiralal, who died in a Bombay hospital barely five months after Gandhis assassination, racked by tuberculosis and probably the version accepted by the play also by syphilis.
These two events provide the starting point for a production that many Indian critics have described as one of the best acted, most provocative English-language plays to emerge from India in years.
So strong was the demand for tickets for the play that the Namashkar Foundation, which is hosting the tour on Americas East Coast, announced at the end of the show that it was planning an encore performance in the New York area on May 30.
