“What’s that smell?” An elementary school girl snickers on the school bus one morning. “Oh, it’s Meena!” she quips, bursting into vicious laughter.

“I just wait for it to be over,” 9-year-old Meena explains to her audience. “I am not on the school bus, I am not on the school bus. I am on a spaceship!” And suddenly, we are transported, with Meena, into the far reaches of outer space and the far reaches of a child’s imagination, powerful enough to take her away from the everyday bullying she faces. On the spaceship, she is accompanied by her dog, Spot, and together they are on a mission to save the world. As they zoom through space, Meena hears from mission control. “What’s that?” she asks, “The President of the United Federation of the World wants to speak with me?” Her jaw drops in amazement, secretly shared with us. Then she straightens up, rising to the importance of the conversation she is about to have, and straightening the mouthpiece of her headset. “Put her on.”

Actress, playwright, and educator Anu Yadav performed Meena’s Dream, a powerful one-woman play, at Wellesley College on February 12th, the culminating performance of a three-day visit to campus during which Ms. Yadav appeared as a guest lecturer in five Wellesley courses across three departments. The show resonates deeply with anyone who has ever felt that they didn’t quite fit in.

But this wasn’t simply a play about identity or bullying or childhood, but something much bigger. Meena’s Dream is an unabashedly political, emotionally intense, and deeply personal commentary on some of the biggest issues facing the United States today: underemployment, a broken healthcare system, childhood poverty, and racism. We might hear about these issues every day, and see them as simply another headline. This play brings these issues to life, especially for those of us in South Asian American diaspora. This is because the story is told from the perspective of a young girl named Meena.

Meena is the daughter of a single mother who is too ill to work consistently, and cannot afford the medicine she needs. Meena and her mother live in housing with thin walls. They are evicted halfway through the play as Meena’s mother attempts to make impossible choices: food or rent? Lights or medicine? But Meena is, in the end, a child who simply wants to feel secure and happy in her everyday life. She is wildly imaginative, and Krishna is her imaginary friend. Krishna convinces Meena to lead the vital quest to defeat the Worry Machine. The play shifts seamlessly from harsh reality to fantasy and back again, as Meena tries to help her mother and overcome her fears.

The experience as a member of the audience of Meena’s Dream was unforgettable. Ms. Yadav masterfully and effortlessly moved from one character to the next, one setting to the next. A shapeshifter on stage, Ms. Yadav used her dancer’s body, expressive face, and formidable voice to impressive effect. Bharatnatyam gestures and poses intermingled with a wide range of dramatic techniques as Ms. Yadav embodied each of the characters in her play with compassion and conviction.

At the end of the play, during an informal Q & A session, Ms. Yadav offered the audience candid, intimate insights into her own family history, her artistic process, and the circumstances that prompted her to make the play. We learned that the play drew from the artist’s own life story, fictionalized and reworked for audiences in Washington D.C., Delhi, and Europe. “I asked my mom whether I could write about our family,” Yadav explained. “And she said, ‘sure! You can write whatever you want about our family as long as it’s fiction.’ So that’s what I did.”

The existence of a play like Meena’s Dream and the years of work that Ms. Yadav has put in to make the play a reality indicates a new moment for American-born South Asians: a moment when we can see and experience our stories on stage, and imagine new artistic possibilities that take full ownership of our place in the multicultural American landscape.

To learn more about Meena’s Dream and Anu Yadav’s work, visit www.anuyadav.com

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