In Front of Your Eyes 2024
Performance Festival Presents:
Shubhra Prakash’s
FONTWALA
at The Marsh San Francisco Mainstage
Written & Performed by Shubhra Prakash
Directed by Ekene Okobi
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Saturday, August 3 at 2:30pm
Opener: Janet Thornburg
Sunday, August 4 at 7:00pm
Opener: Elizabeth Zitrin
Friday, August 9 at 7:30pm
Opener: Irma Herrera
About the Festival
In Front of Your Eyes Performance Festival will feature developing works from women and nonbinary performers and playwrights. The festival will take place in both San Francisco and Berkeley. San Francisco will feature solo shows, and Berkeley will feature ensemble shows.
About the Show
In 1990s India, Fontwala, an ambitious typographer and font designer, creates the Anglo Nagari Keyboard—one of the first software to enable typing Indian scripts on a Latin-based keyboard. Now, his niece Shilpi has returned to India after two decades in the United States to chronicle her uncle’s story. As she delves into his groundbreaking work, Shilpi uncovers the challenges of preserving a complex script in the digital age and the struggles of conveying a multifaceted history in a single narrative. This work was inspired by the true story of Rajeev Prakash, a pioneering typographer and font designer of Indian scripts.
Ticket Information
Tickets: $15 – $35 General Seating sliding scale | $50 & $100 Reserved Seating
Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance,
and additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.
No Intermission | Ages 16+
Please do not bring infants to the show
Please read our
Health, Safety and COVID-19 Information
Our commitment to our patrons
About the Artistic Crew
Shubhra Prakash (Playwright & Performer) is a writer and performer who gained attention for her work on the educational comic Priya’s Mask, covered by NPR and BBC India. She co-wrote, produced, and acted in The Music In My Blood, exploring Indian classical music and the story of Walter Kaufmann, a Jewish refugee in India during World War II. Prakash, an immigrant from India to the United States during her teenage years, has acted in productions in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, where she co-founded Hypokrit Theatre Company in 2014, promoting BIPOC artists. During the pandemic, she collaborated remotely with the Same Boat Theater Collective. Shubhra’s dramaturgy work for Fontwala resulted in digital exhibitions exploring the evolution of Indian Devanagari script. She also staged a version of Fontwala in Hindi with SwaangGhar ensemble actors in New Delhi.
E. Okobi (Director) is an interdisciplinary artist who has staged social practice art performance at the British and Brooklyn Museums, and participated in large scale, time-based productions staged/produced by Complicité, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Berlin’s Gropius Bau. Her plays have been included in the 2011 New York University (NYU) Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana PlayLAB Festival, Athena Theatre’s 2017 Play Reading Series, The 2019 Rapid, Write, Response Short Play Initiative staged by London’s Theatre 503, and the sold out Dear Black People play festival staged by Excellence Theatre at London’s Pleasance Theatre. She has directed work with, and for various young audiences, as well as for the 2020 Same Boat Theater Collective Earthquake Play Readings. She is pleased to build on her directing experience with this excellent script by Shubhra Prakash.
Openers
August 3 – Janet Thornburg’s The Bequest
If a dear old friend passes away and leaves you $2,000, do you have to use it in the way she suggested in the note that comes with the check? Or can you use it to pay for the dental veneers you’ve been longing for? After all, you’re still here, and she’s gone. Or is she?
August 4 – Elizabeth Zitrin’s Second Wave
Fifty years ago, women couldn’t spend money without a husband or father – a warning.
August 9 – Irma Herrera’s Class Migrant: De Aquí y De Allá
During my South Texas childhood, picking cotton was a “Mexican job” (and a “Black job,” too!). Cotton was King and the high school mascot of the neighboring town: The Cottonpickers. To this date, locals refuse to change it — “no shame in honest work,” they say. I’m assigned to a random table at a lawyer’s luncheon and guests are reminiscing about the summer camps of their childhoods. The summer I was 12 years old, my parents made us pick cotton; they wanted us to know how hard they had worked as kids. Do I tell these professional colleagues about this memorable summer?