Identitti Rezeptionista

#Novel adaptation #identity

Student Nivedita is stunned: Her professor Saraswati – her idol, her role model in questions of identity politics – is white!

Until this bombshell, Nivedita, born in Germany to an Indian father, had felt like a new world had opened up for her in the seminars of the supposed Person of Color. Even in the first session, the professor had expelled white students from the room, had written “de-colonise your soul” on the blackboard and discussed the origins of identity struggles and how to deal with them. And now it turns out that Saraswati’s entire career was built on a great lie? A complex and highly emotional debate ensues: Nivedita tweets under the pseudonym “Identitti” and her friends organise protests against this incredible case of cultural appropriation. Meanwhile, Professor Saraswati persists with all arguments until nobody knows anymore what “Person of Color” really and truly means.

Identitti Rezeptionista is a play about the reception of the widely read and debated novel Identitti by Mithu Sanyal from 2020, which was adapted for the stage at many theatres and asked the question: Who is who and who can speak for whom? A question that we often ask in the theatre, too: Who can plausibly play a white professor who has impersonated a Person of Color? The cultural institution of the theatre can also be a powder keg of identity politics at times, but it is a place made for having negotiations about identity. This production is an invitation to become aware of one’s own contradictions and to carry on discussing the political questions of this issue.