India Awaiting

The New York Times reviews a new off-Broadway production of a play that deals with Indian assimilation in the United States. And no, it's not written by the prolific Chitra Banerjee-Divakaruni but, unusually, by an American playwright:

"The tensions of assimilation in the Indian diaspora have been at the center of numerous novels and films, by artists like Hanif Kureishi and Mira Nair. But the playwright Anne Marie Cummings is among the first to bring that experience to the American stage with 'India Awaiting,' an engaging if sometimes shallow variation on the theme of cross-cultural love."

One supposes the primary reason the word "shallow" is included in the above sentence is that the plot of the play is the usual one of Indian boy-meets-American-girl. Cliched it may be, but what better way of bringing out cultural and class differences? Jane Austen and Henry James, to take but two examples, built writing careers by doing just that.