Shubhra Prakash’s
FONTWALA
In Person at the San Francisco Mainstage
Written & Performed by Shubhra Prakash
Directed by Ekene Okobi
Click For Tickets
Wednesday, January 31, 2024 at 7:30pm
Ticket Information
Tickets: $15 – $25 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.
75 minutes | No Intermission | Ages 13+
Please do not bring infants to the show
Please read our
Health, Safety and COVID-19 Information
Our commitment to our patrons
Masks and vaccinations suggested but no longer required
About the Show
In 1990s India, Fontwala is an aspiring typographer and font designer of Indian languages who designs the Anglo Nagari Keyboard, one of the first software that allows typing of Indian scripts on the Latin-based keyboard. In the present time, Shilpi, Fontwala’s niece, has returned to India after spending two decades as an immigrant in the US to write the story of her uncle, Fontwala. Shilpi discovers what it means for a “complex” script to survive in a digital world and for a person with complex history to try and tell one story. Inspired by the story of typographer and font designer of Indian scripts, Rajeev Prakash.
Artist Biography
Shubhra Prakash (शुभ्रा प्रकाश) writer & performer.
During the pandemic her work as writer on the educational comic Priya’s Mask was covered by NPR and the BBC India. As a playwright, she co-wrote, produced, and acted in an original play The Music In My Blood about Indian classical music and Walter Kaufmann, a jewish refugee to India during WWII who contributed to codifying Indian music. The Music In My Blood was staged in New York City, New Jersey and Rockville Maryland. Shubhra was born in India and has been an immigrant in the US since she was a teenager. She has acted in productions both in the SF Bay Area as well as New York City where she moved in 2012. Shubhra worked with NY Fringe Festival and later co-founded Hypokrit Theatre Company in 2014. She was instrumental in putting up festivals that gave BIPOC artists a platform to perform within dance, theater, music and stand up comedy. She has done similar work during the pandemic remotely with Same Boat Theater Collective based in the Bay Area. In December 2018, she moved to India to research her next play, Fontwala. She interviewed her uncle, Rajeev Prakash Khare, a designer and typographer of Indian letterforms, who founded one of the first keyboards that allowed for typing of Indian languages on the computer in the 90s. In the play Fontwala Shubhra explores living in the country of her birth as a woman and not a child after two decades and the story of the first artist she ever knew. Her dramaturgy work for Fontwala, has resulted in two digital exhibitions one currently running through May 15 as part of Diasporic Rhizome via South Asia Institute, Chicago and the other ran in August 2019 (New Delhi) as “Fontwala: Stone to Mobile, what remains?” that showed the evolution of Indian Devanagari script and questioned how digital media impacts the journey of a non-Latin based “complex” script. Shubhra has also staged a version of FONTWALA in Hindi with an ensemble of actors of SwaangGhar in New Delhi this past April.