Harvest (play)
Harvest is a play by Manjula Padmanabhan concerned with organ-selling in India set in the near future. It was first published in 1997 by Kali for women.[1] It is a critique of the commoditization of the third world body.The play confronts us with a futuristic Bombay of the year 2010. Om Prakash, a jobless Indian, agrees to sell unspecified organs through InterPlanta Services, Inc. to a rich person in first-world for a small fortune. InterPlanta and the recipients are obsessed with maintaining Om's health and invasively control the lives of Om, his mother Ma, and his wife Jaya in their one-room apartment. The recipient, Ginni, periodically looks in on them via videophone and treats them condescendingly. Om's diseased brother Jeetu is taken to give organs instead of Om.
Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Prize as the best new international play.
The playtext was published by Aurora Metro Books in 2003.
Selected Performances
- Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota (February 17–25, 2006) Directed by Evan Darwin Winet
- Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 2015. Directed by Susan Russell
- Illinois State University, Normal, IL, April 2017. Directed by David Weber
- Ranga Shankara, Bengaluru, India, May 2018. Directed by Vishnu Narain
- Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal, India, March 2019. Directed by Nidhi Panicker
Reviews
"... a fascinating, funny, and frightening glimpse of what happens when we commodify human beings. Although it addresses globalization, the play's issues are universal. - Backstage
"Savage, swiftian and with humour so black that what little laughter it provokes is painful, Manjula Padmanabhan's award-winning play is really an allegory about relationships." - India Today
"Harvest compels from beginning to end, creating a not-so-fanciful futuristic world that's pretty darned scary." - New York Theater
References