AHON GOOPTU
Playwright | Actor | Producer | Scholar
NOW
-
Encore performance of Item: More Than a Drag Show at The Urban Theatre Project, Kolkata.
-
29 Dec 2025. Tickets!
-
-
Premiere of Seasons of Love at Padatik Studio Theatre II, Kolkata.
-
9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18 Jan 2026. Tickets!
-
NEXT
-
Publication in Shakespeare Adaptations in Indian Cinema, an edited volume by Nishi Pulugurtha: "The Hungry Women: Performing Gendered and Familial Desire in Titus Andronicus" (Routledge).
-
Publication of Labor Day Reunion (Writer's Workshop).
-
House of Darling Presents: A Cabaret Cabaret, a drag-indulgent reimagining of 1931 Berlin through the works of Bob Fosse.
-
The Woods, a site-specific murder mystery play.
SEASONS OF LOVE
Playwright
Katy Lai Roy, Director
as quoted in The Telegraph t2
It's a fascinating journey working closely with Ahon Gooptu, the most open-minded and generous of playwrights, to construct and craft his script into a performance layer by layer.
ITEM
Playwright-Actor
Adreeta Chakraborty
The Telegraph
Ahon’s performance is devised with the kind of generosity that is capable of accommodating humour, pathos, despair and the vicissitudes of queer longing. It speaks to an authenticity of emotion and a devotion to skilful, experimental storytelling. A sharp production design coupled with a series of costumes — that the performer changes in and out of, sometimes in a striptease and sometimes, more coquettishly, behind the partition — adds to Item’s punch and panache.
LABOR DAY REUNION
Playwright-Director
Ananda Lal
KolkataTheatre.com
[Labor Day Reunion] demonstrates a mature hand at playwriting and stagecraft that promises even better things in future. [...] Gooptu deals with such topical concerns as broken relationships, adoption, queerness and single parenting with a rare sensitivity.
Ahon Gooptu is a playwright-actor, theatre producer, collaborator, and performance studies scholar from Kolkata, India. He has found semblances of home in New York, Illinois, Iowa, Washington, Connecticut, and Florida. He is drawn to interdisciplinary collaborations for telling queer, brown, and im/migrant narratives both in India and the United States. He is currently based in Kolkata.
Ahon is Communications and Gallery Associate with Experimenter and founding member of artist collective Curl. His previous roles include Marketing Manager with Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, Artistic Associate with Make/Shift Theatre Company, and Repertory Member with Ranan. He is a Finalist for Definition Theatre's Amplify Series Two (2022), Semifinalist for Playwrights Foundation's 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival (2023), and inaugural recipient of the Sandy Moffett Award for Practice in Theatre and Dance (2021). Ahon has previously worked with the Steppenwolf, Taproot Theatre, The Red Curtain International, Treasure Trunk Theatre, Lime Arts Productions, Farmers Alley Theatre, and the Kennedy Center.
He has published a short collection of plays, All That Glistens (Grinnell College Press, 2021) and co-authored a chapter included in Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies (Bloomsbury, The Arden Shakespeare, 2022). He has a chapter upcoming in Shakespeare Adaptations on the Indian Screen (Routledge, 2026) and a new play publication, Labor Day Reunion (Writer's Workshop, 2026).
Ahon holds an MA in Theatre from Florida State University, a BA in Theatre and English from Grinnell College, and has trained at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Theater Institute.
Photo by Justin Hayworth
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
My work as a SCHOLAR focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, queer studies, and transnationalism, with a special emphasis on im/migrants of colour narratives.
As an EDUCATOR, I see theatre as a space to observe what I see and question what I know, investigate what I think could be and re-conceive what I think should be.
As a THEATREMAKER creating and collaborating on new work, I find ways to consolidate the void that exists between my Indian traditions and contradicting US American cultures.
Theatre, to me, is a space for my truth and perspective to find an expression in the hopes that it will speak to and move at least one person in the audience.
Photo by Justin Hayworth