18, is a historical fantasy during the Mughal Empire, and her rom-com A Nice Indian Boy, about a gay Indian man introducing his white boyfriend to his parents, is currently running at the Olney Theatre Center in Maryland through June 25. Meanwhile House of Joy, set for Repertory Theatre of St. Her new play Queen, now onstage at Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre through June 5 and set for an Off-Broadway run, the author’s first, at ART/New York, June 10-July 1, takes place in the world of academia and honey bee research. in the mid-2010s, takes place partially in the online world of the World of Warcraft role-playing game. Shekar’s breakout hit In Love and Warcraft, which had runs all over the U.S. No two Shekar plays are the same, and the American theatre is suddenly about to see a lot of them. “I enjoy that sort of vicarious, ‘Here’s a totally different society, and how are we going to make it?’”
“I’ve always been in two cultures, and living in India is so different than living here,” she said. She now lives in Jersey City with her husband and her 2-year-old son. Shekar also attributes that love of fantasy to a nomadic childhood: She grew up in San Francisco, then her family moved to Singapore, and later India. She’s attracted to worlds in which “norms are really different, and people are trying to live within those rules and break those rules-that’s always the best part of genre storytelling.” “I just love going into different worlds, where they have totally different rules,” she explained over lunch at BCD Tofu House in Manhattan.
She owes a debt to the Boy Who Lived, after all, because he’s the one who made her fall in love with what she does. Now in her 30s and about to give birth to her second child, Shekar retains a youthful energy, as well as plenty of Potter thoughts the Broadway hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, she offered, “is bad fan fiction, but I really enjoyed the production.”
“I didn’t even bother to use a pen name, you can actually look it up,” she told me. Growing up in India, she was a devoted Potterhead, so her first forays into writing were Harry Potter fan fiction, which she posted on, Sugarquill, and Fiction Alley. Madhuri Shekar has been writing since she was a teenager.