If House of India sounds like a restaurant, it’s because that’s what it is. Or was.
“Growing up (in the Farmington Hills suburb of Detroit), I’d always go to a handful of Indian restaurants as a special treat,” recalled San Diego playwright Deepak Kumar. “One of them was called House of India.
“I left Michigan around 2016 to go to graduate school and came back around 2019. I was telling my parents we should go to House of India. They said ‘They’re closed.’ That was very sad because it was a place of fond memories for me.”
That was “the first kernel,” as Kumar called it, of what would become his play “House of India,” which will make its world premiere next weekend at the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre. The second was the realization that “I had no competency with food, and food is such a big part of my family and my culture. I sheepishly asked my mother ‘Hey, can you teach me how to make some of these things?’ She was super excited because it gave her an opportunity for us to connect.”
The connection led to Kumar’s learning about his Indian-born mother’s immigration experience, “the kinds of dreams she had for herself and what she sacrificed to come here. She always wanted to run a restaurant but never thought she could because she felt an obligation to find a ‘stable’ job to a family.”
This series of revelations would produce the first draft of Kumar’s “House of India,” a play he described as “about an Indian restaurant vanishing, and about exploring these questions of dreams and obligations and duty and family.”
Kumar’s play finds comedy and conflict in the titular House of India outside Cleveland. The struggling restaurant’s South Asian owner Ananya (Mahira Kakkar) clings to her and her late husband’s original dream for the place while her forward-thinking Thai-American cook, Jacob (Tommy Bo), urges her to contemporize the menu of traditional dishes and the House of India vibe.
Prior to this world premiere, “House of India” was workshopped at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y. and at the Old Globe. About a year ago, Kumar began working on the play with Zi Alikhan, who is directing this production.
Alikhan is the son of two Indian immigrants. “House of India,” he said, “is about that intergenerational conversation and what do we children of immigrants owe our parents, and it’s about creating new ripples of identity in this country. It is funny, it is fast, it is both invigorating and also very heartwarming and heartbreaking.”
“It holds so many of the stories of me, my parents and my friends inside it,” Alikhan said. “This story is full of so much life and is so photorealistic in the way it talks about the survival of people of color in this country, of immigrants in this country, of brown people in this country, of people who are perceived as dangerous. It does the best thing that theater can do by shining an accessible light on stories that need to be heard in order to create more conversation about the world around us.”
With a nod to the play’s comedy and its focus on a family at odds, Alikhan likens it to “something between ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ and ‘Uncle Vanya.’”
“House of India” is director Alikhan’s third world premiere this spring, the others being John Anthony Loffredo’s “Frou-Frou: A Menagerie of Sorts” at the Boston Court in Pasadena and Keiko Green’s “You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World” at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa.
“All three of the writers have taught me so much about theater-making and so much about myself, about generosity and being a good person,” Alikhan said.
Kumar, who moved to San Diego last year, is not only a writer but a researcher, that rare individual with both left brain and right brain working prolifically. He’s an assistant professor in the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science at UC San Diego when he’s not writing for the theater.
“A creative part of me has always been there,” Kumar said. “My mother very early on was like ‘You have to be a well-rounded person. I’m going to put you in a music class or a singing class.’ At the same time I was doing math classes. I was being primed to think about both of these parts of the world as part of who I am.”
His cultural heritage is a major part of who he is. Now, so is “House of India.”
“I would love people to recognize the bigness of India. It’s huge,” he said. “There is so much richness there that we don’t get to see. I want people to know that the Indian-American experience is an American experience.”
Alikhan is definitely on the same page.
“My goal as a theater maker,” he said, “is to be able to create doorways through which people can experience lives very different from their own and in so doing practice empathy for other people. I hope that with the state of America today this play can be a conversation piece.”
‘House of India’
When: Previews, Saturday through May 14; Opens May 15 and runs through June 8. 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, The Old Globe, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $41 and up
Phone: 619-234-5623
Online: theoldglobe.org
