LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Photo by Cheshire Isaacs Dear Rep Family, It is my great joy to welcome you to the 56th season at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. Inspired by the spirit of reinvestment, reemergence, and renewal: we are committed to reinvesting in the art and the vitality of our community with civic and cultural partnerships for every show. We are reemerging with joyful, entertaining, and compelling art, from treasured classics to bold, new works from the most prolific voices of the contemporary American Theatre—one of whose work you will experience tonight. And finally, we are renewing our commitment to each of you with a joyful season full of drama, thrills, and laughs at The Rep. I cannot think of a better way to embark on the journey of our 2022-2023 season than with a new play that captures all the love, magic, adventure and beauty that only great theatre can deliver. Madhuri Shekar’s House of Joy is a profound exploration of freedom, love, loyalty, and liberation. Set against the beautiful backdrop of the Mughal Empire in South Asia, House of Joy transports us to a fictional, mystical world filled with beauty, a glittering land predominantly populated by women, ruled by an Emperor (obsessed with bearing a son) and protected by a fierce femme guard of warriors. With a deftness of language from our playwright and the masterful hand of our director,

it is easy to be swept away by the lush utopia, where even the house is a breathing being. House of Joy is also a treatise on love and identity, delving into its forms, beauty, and complexities. How do you interface in a world that has not made space for you? What do you do when your relationships are misaligned with your heart? While the rules of this magnificent world may at first blush seem strange, the familiar structures of how society can imprison, even with velvet handcuffs, quickly unfurls. Through her storytelling, Madhuri uses magic to fracture the utopian surface, shattering our illusions and helping us confront the ties that bind and the love that liberates us in our lives. Buckle up for this swashbuckling story, which promises to overturn all our conceits on love, power, and privilege.

Hana S. Sharif AUGUSTIN FAMILY ARTISTIC DIRECTOR away from modern-day America. I always loved studying the Mughal Empire, and all of the characters who existed at that time. And I wanted to write a play inspired by that for a long time, but I couldn’t find a way in until I randomly saw an article on the internet that talked about the female guards in the harem. And even though I had studied Indian history in college, I’d

To go beyond what is usually covered in traditional program notes, House Of Joy’s playwright (MADHURI SHEKAR) and the production’s dramaturg (SALMA ZOHDI) decided to have a conversation that captures the spirit of program notes, and imagine what would’ve been said in a postshow discussion. In this conversation, MADHURI and SALMA talk about how this play, its characters, its world, the house, and those who live by it and roam in it all came to life.

SALMA ZOHDI: You are an extremely imaginative playwright who roots many of her works in fantasy world-building with a playful intersection with history… what drew you to build this world of House Of Joy and how did it all start?

MADHURI SHEKAR: It started from multiple different places. It started with an urge to write something that was set in a land and a time far

never actually known that there were female guards— highly trained female guards - who were protecting the royal women in the harem. That became my entry point into this world. These are the people I want to write about.

I wanted to take inspiration from that world - the culture, the hierarchies, the aesthetics - but then write a story that was truly exciting for me, one that I would want to see on stage. One not necessarily bound by the limitations of history or physics. So that’s where it all came from.

House Of Joy had a life in 2019 where it had a run in California Shakespeare Theater. The version we are seeing at The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis today is a different iteration from the 2019 narrative. Can you tell us a bit more of the past versions of this play and what compelled you to rewrite it? But also, when did you first start writing it?

I feel like I’ve been working on this for an embarrassingly long time. But luckily, I still really enjoy the world and the characters, so I’m not tired of it yet. I started writing this play during

MADHURI SHEKAR playwright

the winter of 2016– for very obvious reasons I wanted to get far away from our contemporary time. It went through many workshops and development processes. And then we had a wonderful world premiere, at Cal Shakes (California Shakespeare Theatre), and then a wonderful second production at San Diego Rep (San Diego Repertory Theatre). That version of the script still exists. But for this new production in St. Louis, I really wanted to see if I could take a stab at rewriting the whole play after taking stock of what I learned in those two productions. It took seeing the play onstage, working with the actors, and rehearsing with them to realize that some things in the play dramaturgically just were not working. Character arcs were not quite believable, and thematically it wasn’t what I wanted it to be.

So I’ve rewritten it now with a love story at the center that’s driving most of the action, and the change. I find that much more fun to write about, much more soul nourishing to write about, and something that just feels a lot more human. Like, why do people make radical change in their lives for the better? Most of the time it’s because of love. So that’s what I wanted to write about. This is a new version that’s going up for the first time in St. Louis.

This is exciting! So is this House Of Joy 2.0 or 3.0? This is 2.0! The first script is quite different. And with characters that don’t exist