M[xx]: The Dignity Project

In 2023, at 81, my mother was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. “Enough,” she said,
“I want to die with dignity.”  She defined dignity on her own terms.  Her words, along with my experiences navigating the medical system with her and with my father, a physician who died ten years earlier, sparked the idea for this project, which received the 2024 Hermitage Greenfield Prize for Theater, a two-year commission for a new work for the stage.

M[xx]: The Dignity Project (M[xx] ), is that new work.  It's a theater performance piece that weaves the experiences of intergenerational South Asian diasporic women in America, from menses to death.  To date, I’ve  interviewed nearly fifty South Asian women, ages 18 to 90, living in the US, about their encounters with the “machinery” of American healthcare, aging, and mortality.  Inspired by their stories and those of my mother and the women in my family, the piece centers on how women engage with or disrupt scripts internalized in their bodies, give and receive care, and wrestle with their own definitions of dignity when they navigate the “machinery” of America’s medical, elder, and end-of-life care industries that are often centered on a key tenet: to prolong life.

I'll lead a creative production team and direct an ensemble of 8 performers of South Asian origin to mount 5 public performances at Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, January 13-16, 2027, as part of the Exponential Festival with support from New Georges & the cell theatre 2027 residency. 

Rather than a single linear narrative, the piece is a collage of scenes, sound, movement, installation before, during and/or after each performance, spectators are invited to share their own perspectives on dignity, moving audiences beyond passive consumption into genuine engagement in the topic with themselves and in community with each other.