Nautanki Bazaar

Happy 2026! Nautanki Bazaar's "Play Reading Club" returns on Fri, Jan 16 where we'll be reading "Behsharam", a play in English by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti - Two daughters, two mothers, one father, a cardboard cut-out and a foul mouthed granny, a household at war and a family which will do anything to protect its secrets.

Behsharam is Bhatti's first play. It broke box office records at Soho Theatre and Birmingham Rep when it opened in 2001.

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti (born 1968) was a core writer on The Archers from 2012 to 2019. She has also written for EastEnders and Hollyoaks. In 2025, her adaptation of Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material will be produced at the Lyric Hammersmith and her play Choir will open at Chichester Festival Theatre.

Friday, Jan 16 at 7pm at the Daniels Spectrum, Toronto

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Nautanki Bazaar's "Play Reading Club" returns on Fri, Nov 14 where we'll be reading "Disgraced" by Ayad Akhtar - When Amir and his artist wife, Emily, host an intimate dinner party at their Upper East Side New York apartment, what starts put as a friendly conversation soon escalates into something far more damaging.

Disgraced (2012) is the first stage play by playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Ayad Akhtar. The play, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and has also been recognized with a 2012 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work – Play or Musical and a 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting. The 2014 Broadway transfer earned a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play in 2015.

Ayad Akhtar (born October 28, 1970) is an American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He is the only South Asian to have won the Pultizer Prize in Drama.

Friday, Nov 14 at 7pm at the Daniels Spectrum

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Nautanki Bazaar's "Play Reading Club" returns on Thu, April 17 where we'll be reading Girish Karnad's "Hayavadana" - The play tells the story of two friends who are in love with the same woman and who accidentally swap heads. The narrative also tells the story of a man with a horse's head who seeks to become human.

Written in 1971, it was based on a theme drawn from The Transposed Heads, a 1940 novella by Thomas Mann, which is originally found in the 11th-century Sanskrit text Kathasaritsagara. It also employed the folk theatre form of Yakshagana.

Girish Karnad (19 May 1938 – 10 June 2019) was an Indian actor, film director, writer, playwright and a Jnanpith awardee, who predominantly worked in Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi films. He was a recipient of the 1998 Jnanpith Award, the highest literary honour conferred in India.

Thursday, April 17 at 7pm at the Daniels Spectrum 

RSVP Now to [email protected]