Bhopal

Bhopal, 1984. With the presence of the Carbide International pesticide factory, the city begins to claw its way out of endemic poverty. But what is to be made of the deformed babies born to women living near the factory? And the poison gas explosion that will leave three thousand people dead in just a few minutes—and will kill tens of thousands more in the years to come. How could have this happened?

AUTHOR

Guillermo Verdecchia

Guillermo Verdecchia is a writer of drama, fiction, and film; a director, dramaturge, actor, and translator whose work has been seen and heard on stages, screens, and radios across the country and around the globe. The author, or co-author, of, among other works, The Noam Chomsky Lectures and Insomnia (with Daniel Brooks); Fronteras Americanas, The Terrible but Incomplete Journals of John D., bloom; A Line in the Sand (with Marcus Youssef), and the controversial Adventures of Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil (with Camyar Chai and Marcus Youssef). He is a recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Drama, a four-time winner of the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, a recipient of Dora and Jessie Awards, and sundry film festival awards for his film Crucero/Crossroads, based on Fronteras Americanas and made with Ramiro Puerta. He lives in Toronto with Tamsin Kelsey, his partner of many years, and their two children.

AUTHOR

Rahul Varma

Rahul Varma is a playwright and artistic director of Teesri Duniya Theatre in Montreal, which he co-founded in 1981. In 1998 he co-founded the quarterly alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage, where many of his articles have appeared. He writes both in Hindi and English. Some of his recent plays are Land Where the Trees Talk, No Man’s Land, Trading Injuries, Bhopal, and State of Denial. His plays have been translated into French, Italian, Hindi and Punjabi. He is a recipient of Special Juror’s Award from the Quebec Drama Federation.

Reviews

“The characters who inhabit Rahul Varma’s play […] are all seeking the common good. But they are not guided by the same priorities or goals. To get what they want, they must negotiate with each other. Each time they do, something is lost. And these losses ultimately ad up to disaster. This play—a pitiless analysis of the stakes of globalization—explores how this happens.”