Doongaji House: Selected Plays collects the finest plays of award-winning playwright Cyrus Mistry. Doongaji House won the Sultan Padamsee Award for Playwriting in 1978 and depicts the travails of a Parsi family living in a crumbling old mansion in Mumbai. The Legacy of Rage is a coruscating look at a dysfunctional East Indian family squabbling over their inheritance and the sweeping changes in society that have brought them to the edge of penury. A Flowering of Disorder, a play that is being published for the first time, is also set in Mumbai and goes deep into the problems, both farcical and profound, of a middle-class family attempting to cope with the challenges of living in a metropolis. Taken together, these brilliant plays expose the insecurities, frailties, and contradictions that lie at the heart of Indian middle-class society.
Cyrus Mistry began his writing career as a playwright, freelance journalist and short-story writer. His play Doongaji House, written in 1977 when he was twenty-one, has acquired classic status in contemporary Indian theatre in English. One of his short stories was made into a Gujarati feature film. His plays and screenplays have won several awards. His novel, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (2012), won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, 2014.
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