TV star turns director

A familiar face on Bengaluru’s theatre scene and on Kannada television, Shashank Purushotham turns director for a play that captures the life of a child who is born as neither a girl nor a boy, after 10 years of debuting on stage as an actor.
Called Untitled, Shashank explains, “It is a common phenomenon in many cultures to prefer a boy child. The girl child is not only unwanted, but often killed either as a foetus or as a newborn.What if the child was neither? Untitled follows the life of one such child. The play moves between two time frames, spanning 20 years, observing the conflicts of the family that had the unwanted child and the present circumstances of the grown-up individual.”
Of the play written by Vijay Padaki, Shashank tells us, “The play highlights one aspect in the fluidity of genders called Intersex, which describes a person who is comfortable being both a girl and a boy. In addition to the individual in question, it brings forth the reactions of people around this individual.”