Maiyya

Inspired by Geetanjali Shree’s debut novel, Mai, Maiyya, is a one woman interactive play set over the course of a single night in a home in Vrindavan. Maiyya follows nine-year-old Achyutaa, a restless, imaginative child obsessed with the stories her mother tells her about Lord Krishna. Suhaani Gala, actor, director and writer of Maiyya, speaks to us about the creation of this play, the intricacies of balancing various roles at once and the magic of the production process.
 
Maiyya and Its Creation
It is curious that Maiyya — the play I have lived with the longest and poured the most of myself into — was born almost casually, through an offhand conversation with my friend Vighnesh Hampapura. He was facilitating Geetanjali Shree’s visit to Ashoka University earlier this year, and when he mentioned the possibility of students adapting one of her novels into a play, I instinctively blurted, ‘I’ll do it!’ A few days later, he handed me a copy of Khali Jagah, but at the same time, I was already reading Mai for a course in the English department. Both novels, in their density and daring, are a playwright’s dream: full of mud to wrestle with, and fertile contradictions to lose oneself in. But I knew, almost instinctively, that it had to be Mai.
Something in my own psychic state — my troubled relationship with the figure of the mother and all the unsettled terrains it exposes in one’s self — resonated with Shree’s narrator. That disquiet became the germ of Maiyya. I wrote the first draft feverishly over four nights, moving between Shree’s Hindi and Nita Kumar’s translation, guided by the scenes that refused to let me go. Looking back, I see how much my identification with the narrator initially blinded me. The earliest staging, for instance, failed to fully articulate Mai’s silence as a radical, resistant act — a silence that unsettles our own colonized imagination of what counts as resistance. Our rush to 'speak for' her may, in fact, reveal how complicit we are in perpetuating the very patriarchal logics we claim to resist.
Yet, theatre is a form that insists on reinvention. Maiyya has changed with me, and continues to do so. Each reimagining feels like a renewed attempt to wrestle with Shree’s provocation: to encounter Mai not as a figure to be rescued, but as one who redefines what defiance itself might look like.

Acting, Directing, Writing, All at Once
I would be dishonest if I said the process hasn’t been overwhelming. Taking on writing, directing, and acting means being tugged simultaneously in three directions — each with its own responsibilities, anxieties, and labours that, under ordinary circumstances, would be carried separately. And yet, I would be just as dishonest if I said this triplicity hasn’t also been one of the most exhilarating, playful, and nourishing creative experiences I’ve had.
Some of my favourite days are the loneliest ones: locked in the studio, rehearsing in front of a mirror, repeating a single line eight or ten times until the director in me finally feels satisfied with the actor in me. There are moments when the actor improvises something that delights the director, and moments when she utterly fails her — those are brutal days. Sometimes the actor and director conspire together, joining forces to interrogate the playwright, who must then defend her script or accept its flaws. In this tug-of-war, I have found not confusion but companionship with myself—a deepening dialogue between the different selves that love theatre in their own ways, and who now trust each other enough to be both generous and merciless.
Of course, the challenges are real. Time, above all, is merciless: the hours I might have spent as an actor resting, writing to my character, or revisiting lines are now spent with my set, light, and sound designers, aligning visions and logistics. Yet, this burden has been made lighter by the generosity of my collaborators, who have shown up at impossible hours and carried the work with me. What looks like a one-woman show is, in truth, a village effort — raising Achyutaa, the child at the heart of the play, together.
And then there is the strange grief of directing and acting at once: never being able to watch one’s own play. I’ve learned to accept this absence by training myself to watch through the audience instead — attending to their breaths, their shifting postures, their silences. Their bodies become my mirror, and in their reflections, I glimpse the play I cannot otherwise see.

On Playing Achutyaa
I love playing Achyutaa. There is something liberating about her impulses, her dramatic excesses, her refusal to withhold — she bares her psyche to the audience with a candour I can only envy in my everyday life. What I most wish to carry away from her, after every rehearsal or show, is her lightness: the playfulness, curiosity, and freedom with which she approaches people and the world.
But Achyutaa is also marked by heartbreak. In the play, she circles around a revelation that wounds her, but she cannot bear to interrogate it. She disavows the very act of thinking, and in doing so, allows heartbreak itself to harden into the truth of her life. She becomes defined by her refusal to move past the wound — haunting it, or perhaps letting it haunt her. On stage, this circling becomes almost literal; it is part of how the character moves through space.
I recognise that impulse in myself. There are heartbreaks in my own life I have, at times, preferred to orbit rather than confront. And yet, playing Achyutaa has taught me not to normalise that state. The play becomes a kind of mirror, reminding me that I do not want to keep identifying with her way of being in relation to the mother — or to others. In that sense, she is both a joy to inhabit and a warning to heed: a character who gives me permission to be playful, but also challenges me to think where she refuses to.

Production Process
The production has been deliberately elaborate and dynamic — designed so the audience never feels static in the space, even though every element is present from the very beginning. The set, in some way, becomes an active partner in my performance, facilitating how I move, where I pause, and how I open myself to the audience. Our set designer and production manager, Sayona Chachra Pahwa, imagined the home as a microcosm of Vrindavan itself. The stage carries both intimacy and expansiveness: a raised platform and staircase functioning as the terrace, a charpai scattered with toys and blankets beneath which sits a trunk, an altar with matkas and a central rangoli, and a swing modelled after Radha-Krishna paintings. The detailing of the platform echoes the textures of Varanasi’s houses — almost a kind of lived-in beauty that suggests both permanence and fragility. For our Delhi performance, the set has remained essentially the same, though adapted to the architecture of the venue. That adaptability itself has been part of the process: learning how to let the play breathe in different spaces. Of course, this staging has come with its own challenges — it is our first time performing in Delhi, so negotiating venue requirements, logistics, outreach, and marketing has been as much a part of the production as rehearsals themselves. Yet, in many ways, this too feels true to the spirit of Maiyya: a play that is never static, always reshaped by its environment, its collaborators, and the audience it encounters.

Questions to Take Home
Upon watching the play, I hope the audience carries questions with them — questions about their mothers, about patriarchy, about what resistance looks like, about the saviour complexes we inherit and reproduce, about how we form and fail in our relationships, and about the very architectures of our imagination. Maiyya does not attempt to answer these; instead, it stages scenes that open a space of inquiry, scenes that refuse closure.
What matters to me is not only the immediate encounter — the silence, laughter, or discomfort the play evokes in the theatre — but the afterlife of that encounter. I hope the audience continues the work of the play outside the auditorium: in conversations with a friend on the way home, in an argument over dinner, or even in private reflections that return days later. For me, that is why theatre persists: because the sensations it provokes — grief, recognition, disturbance, delight — can only survive if they are translated into thought and dialogue.
And at their core, those sensations are always questions. Questions that unsettle, questions that demand listening, questions that remind us that our work — as audience, as citizens, as human beings — is not to soothe ourselves with answers but to stay with the unease of asking better, deeper questions.

Catch Maiyya, adapted, directed and performed by Suhaani Gala at Kathika Cultural Centre and Museum, Delhi, on 6th September. Book tickets here. 

Date 3-9-2025