Lily Abha Cratsley Always Picks Up the Phone
Performer and playwright Lily Abha Cratsley recently celebrated the first staged production of her play "ABCD" at the Greenway Court Theatre – and she’s just getting started.
If you happened to drive on Fairfax Avenue this past November, you might have seen performer and playwright Lily Abha Cratsley’s name on the Greenway Court Theatre marquee. At 23, the first staged production of Lily’s one-act play, ABCD, premiered with a limited theatrical run, including two sold-out performances at the Los Angeles theater and famed Youtuber and talk-show host Lilly Singh in attendance.
ABCD, which stands for “American Born Confused Desi,” features the story of three generations of Indian American women as they reunite for the first time in years, navigate their intergenerational trauma, and what it means to hold a dual identity of being both American and Desi. Over the course of a meal, college student Willow, her mother Aditi, and her Nani have difficult conversations, laugh, cry, and listen in an attempt to better understand one another.
“It's a play centering Indian American women and the only characters in it are Indian American women,” Lily said. “I'm trying to get to the core of the mother-daughter conflicts that come up in Indian American families and look at a pathway in which they might be resolved, but they don't actually get resolved on stage.”
Greenway Arts Alliance and KriyaShakti Performing Arts co-produced the play which featured actresses Nikita Chaudhry, Sonal Shah, and Suni M!. Originally set for six performances across the second and third weekends in November, ABCD received an extension for one more weekend with additional performances on Dec. 1 and 2.
During the month-long production process, Lily juggled her full-time job, producing, the rehearsal schedule, and rewrites.
“It was three weeks of rehearsals, one week of tech, and then the show went up,” Lily said.
The play begins with Nani’s arrival from India ahead of Willow’s older sister Tara’s Arangetram, a solo debut performance for dancers studying the Indian classical dance style Bharatanatyam. Recently divorced Aditi is anxious as she juggles the expectations of her mother and the yearning of her daughter, Willow, to learn from Nani as they spend an evening together. Later in the show, Nani tells Willow about the Dotbusters, a racist hate group that engaged in violence against the New Jersey South Asian community beginning in the 1970s up until the 1990s. Nani, who moved to Jersey City after emigrating from India, confides in Willow that she is having trouble returning for Tara’s Arangetram due to the trauma and pain her community faced.
“The play is not autobiographical, but it's very much informed by my family's history of immigration in the US,” Lily said. “My mom grew up in Jersey during the time of the Dotbusters.”
In her mission statement, Lily said she hopes the play will encourage “families in the diaspora to heal our wounds together and claim our history as children of immigrants.” Her personal goal has always been to make the play the best it could be for her mother, her Nani, and her sister.
“I went in writing this play for Indian American women and so for them, I wanted them to feel seen, valued, loved, and heard,” Lily said. “I wanted people to think about their relationships to their families and their culture, and feel hopeful that this conflict can be reconciled in some way.”
Director of the first staged production J. Mehr Kaur said working with Lily on ABCD has been inspiring and fruitful for her.
“In the beginning of my career, I didn't so much get to work with South Asian playwrights on plays that centered South Asian characters,” Mehr said. “Our cast and our team is just incredible. Everyday I feel really grateful to be able to spend time with them and to be able to explore the story with them.”
Mehr joined the project after Lily found her information through a South Asian Theater Database when she was looking for a director for the production at Greenway. Mehr, who enjoys working with new playwrights on new plays, felt an immediate connection during her first conversation with Lily.
“We jumped on the phone almost instantaneously after I got the email,” Mehr said. “I've gotten to know her as an artist and a person, and it's been such a pleasure working with her on the show.”
Although the play was staged in-person for the first time this year, ABCD was first written in the fall of 2021. Lily, who has been a thespian and performer her whole life, only recently stepped behind the scenes when she began writing ABCD for a college playwriting class.
“It is the first play I've ever written,” Lily said. “A requirement of the playwriting class [was] that at the end of the semester, you submit the play you wrote in class to the Occidental New Works Festival, so I submitted.”
Soon after, ABCD was accepted into the 2022 New Works Festival where Lily was first introduced to her collaborator and director Reena Dutt, when Reena was hired to direct the virtual staged reading. After being taught by white men and women in theater, Lily said working with Reena was a turning point in her career.
“I connected with Reena, we had a phone call, and something just clicked. It was actually the first time in my creative journey that I had met a South Asian female in professional theater,” Lily said. “It was such a powerful moment to me where I felt like I saw myself, for the first time, represented in this industry that I wanted to be in.”
From there, they began rehearsing on Zoom with a cast of three incredible actresses – Nikita Chaudhry, who reprised her role for the Greenway Court Theatre production, Shivani Thakkar, and Shruti Tewari – to play the roles of Willow, Aditi, and Nani. In her script, Lily specified that she wanted as many people as possible on the production team to be South Asian to encourage diverse perspectives on a play centered around culture.
“In my playwriting class, there was often this barrier where I could get feedback on the progression of the story and the writing, but not really on the themes and how poignant it felt,” Lily said. “There wasn't anyone in my class who shared that identity.”
Lily said hearing the perspectives of the actresses, giving context and sharing stories about their families and backgrounds, helped the script become better and more informed.
“I was in a rehearsal room with like-minded people who could connect to the themes of the story,” Lily said.
The virtual reading took place Feb. 2023 with attendees logging into a Zoom room to watch the one-act play.
“I knew throughout the rehearsal process that this [play] meant something to South Asian women,” Lily said. “But when we had this diverse audience in that virtual reading – getting feedback from a whole host of different folks of different identities, of different ethnicities, different immigrant backgrounds, different female backgrounds – all of that really informed me that there was something also universal that people were really connecting to.”
After that, Lily began submitting the play to various theaters and festivals. She decided to stop editing the script as she needed to see the play performed again to see how the story would evolve.
Later that year, ABCD was selected for the Garry Marshall Theatre New Works Festival, Lily’s first festival submission, in September 2022. Reena and Lily teamed up once again to workshop the play, but this time, they wanted a brand new cast.
“I felt that to learn more about the show, I needed to work with three different Indian actors who had different experiences,” Lily said. “It was an incredibly generative process again, and there were a lot of rewrites again. That's something that I think is so fun about playwriting – it's just always evolving.”
For the second reading, Reena and Lily cast actresses Anjani Joshi, Sharmila Devar, and Suni M!, who would later return as Nani for the Greenway Court Theatre production. After the performance, Lily was met again with positive responses from the theater community and had her first playwriting pay day.
“To do [the show] at a professional, working theater was huge,” Lily said. “I did get my first check as a playwright, a small little stipend, and I've saved the check to this day. It was really valuable to me, so I saved it and I was like, ‘I'm gonna keep this and if ABCD ever goes big, I'll still have this check from the first ever time I got paid as a playwright.’”
Unsure of ABCD’s next step, Lily switched gears and began working on The Fairy Who Cried Gems, a solo show for her undergraduate thesis. Inspired by a folk tale from Ladakh, The Fairy Who Cried Gems uses verbatim theater techniques and folk tales to bring the identity and experiences of Desi American women to life.
Verbatim theater employs the words of real people, often shared in interviews, and is considered a form of documentary theater. Lily first studied these techniques with Professor Derek Goldman during her first two years of undergrad at Georgetown University.
“It's really about inhabiting another person's words exactly as they were presented,” Lily said. “It's a really powerful tool in art, in particular art that's justice and equity oriented, because you're looking at real experiences and performing them as authentically as you can.”
Lily decided to interview South Asian friends and family, exploring themes of contradiction, belonging, and home within Desi American identities.
“I feel like belonging is really a good way to frame what I started, and I just got so many incredible, generous contributions from people,” Lily said. “Then I had the crazy idea to take these interviews and turn them into folk tales of my own.”
Lily wanted the show to be whimsical, as she incorporated verbatim quotes into the monologues of fairy tale characters, often matching the characterization to the pace and tone of the interviewee. The first workshop of The Fairy Who Cried Gems was held at Occidental College in April 2023 with members of the ABCD family in the audience. Alone on stage, Lily executed scene transitions and character changes using movement, dance, and music.
“It was the most vulnerable piece of theatre I've ever made,” Lily said. “ABCD felt vulnerable, but in my solo show, it is me and I am performing as myself.”
As Lily stepped out of college and into the theater community in Los Angeles, she began to audition and self-tape, all the while balancing a full-time non-profit job. She continued to submit ABCD, often hearing no responses from festivals or theaters.
“I started to get really frustrated about ABCD not getting traction. I just felt like people really needed to hear the story,” Lily said. “I felt like I didn't have a lot of people in my corner, which wasn't necessarily true, but I didn't know that yet.”
Checking in on Lily’s post-grad life, Shivani, who played Aditi in the first virtual reading of ABCD and later became Lily’s professor at Occidental College when she taught a course on Bollywood dance, encouraged Lily to seek out alternative routes to get ABCD onstage.
“A few weeks later, she [sent] me an email [that] the Greenway Court Theatre was accepting submissions for a co-residency production,” Lily said. “She [said], ‘You gotta submit ABCD.”
Shivani, Lily, and Reena got on an email thread to discuss the submission when they learned that Reena would not be available during the residency dates.
“I was like, ‘I'm on my own, do I really want to do this? Can I do this?’” Lily said. “Shivani offered to help me produce, so I went ahead and submitted that application.”
Lily said she had forgotten about the submission when she got a call from a random number.
“A weird thing about being a creative in LA is you have to pick up every phone call from a random number,” Lily said. “It's such a whirlwind every time because I feel like the times that I think it's gonna be a spam call, it's something legit.”
As it turned out, it was legit. Mohammed Ali Ojarigi, the producing director at Greenway Arts Alliance, called Lily to talk about the prospect of producing ABCD.
“The first thing Mohammed really [told] me was, ‘You can't cook on stage, is that a deal breaker?’” Lily said. “I [said], ‘Nope, I just want to do this show, that is not a deal breaker. Let's go for it, I'll find a way to make it work.’”
With food being central to the story, actress and Assistant Stage Manager (ASM) for the play’s most recent production, Simran “Simi” Fulton, was in charge of setting and resetting the food for each show.
“We had to actually think about ‘Okay, what should be available in the kitchen?’ because we had to produce all of it,” Simi said. “I never really thought about what [it takes] to create a kitchen, and especially a kitchen that cooks Indian food somewhat regularly, which also has a whole other array of spices and stuff on top of everything.”
From there, Shivani came on board with her newly founded dance and performing arts company, KriyaShakti Performing Arts. Soon after, Mehr joined the team and they cast three actresses, with two cast members – Nikita Chaudhry and Suni M! – returning from past productions.
“It was an incredibly short timeline, but we knew that we had to take the opportunity,” Lily said. “We wanted to prove to the Los Angeles art community that Desi theater is something powerful and deserving of their time, attention, and money.”
Simi is the only other person aside from Lily who has been a part of every production of ABCD, seeing the play’s journey from screen to stage. She first stepped into the world of the play when Lily asked her to come read for Aditi in a reading for Lily’s playwriting class.
“It was really cool for me because it was the first South Asian work that I had read for [and] the first South Asian character I played, so that was a really fun experience,” Simi said.
For Lily, talking about the play with Simi helped her see its evolution going into the first-staged production.
“She knew the script probably better than any of them,” Lily said. “She's been my one constant collaborator through every iteration of this play and I can't imagine trying to do it without her now.”
Simi said she hopes the play’s reach continues to expand, allowing for more South Asian actors to access the work.
“I think for South Asian theater makers, I want these plays to be a lot more accessible,” Simi said. “Someone asked [Lily] to use Willow’s monologue as a monologue for an audition or something, and I was like, ‘That's so exciting. That's what I want to hear. If I had a South Asian monologue growing up, oh my god.’”
However, throughout the production process, Lily said she struggled with imposter syndrome and perfectionism.
“I felt this weight of the entire South Asian theatre community on my shoulders. I had to prove, single-handedly, somehow to Los Angeles and the world, that they need to start investing in South Asian artists, which was an unfair pressure to put on myself and a kind of absurd one,” Lily said. “Other people often have to remind me that I graduated college a few months ago.”
Lily said she was only able to take a step back and recognize her accomplishments after the second weekend of performances.
“I finally got to respond to all of these DMs that I hadn't yet, and work through all of these emails and kind messages people had sent, and really read the reviews again and be like, ‘Okay, now that I'm out of this, imposter syndrome, high stress, perfectionist mindset, I can actually enjoy and be proud of what what I just did,’” Lily said. “We're letting go of some of that pressure and just trying to make a show that I'm really happy with and that I can feel really proud of, and not as much feeling like I have to change the entire culture around Indian Americans in theater in one show.”
For now, Lily is continuing to audition and pursue performance and playwriting opportunities in LA. Her ultimate goal is to perform ABCD in Jersey City or in New Jersey, where ABCD is set.
“If I don't accomplish anything else and I can get ABCD to Jersey, I will be happy and feel fulfilled,” Lily said. “For me, that's really what I'm passionate about. What's next is just trying to continue to carve out a space for South Asian voices in live theater.”
An optimist by nature, Lily said the everlasting message of ABCD is hope.
“The scars that we all have, we can start to heal them,” Lily said, “It's going to take a long time and it's not going to happen overnight, which is why it doesn't happen overnight for these characters, why they're still in conflict at the end, but we can get a step closer to understanding and loving each other better.”
You can find Lily on Instagram at @labhac or on her website https://www.lilyabha.com.
Photos are courtesy of Lily Abha Cratsley. Photo 1: Noah Pavlov / Photo 2: Nick Graves / Photo 3: Noah Pavlov / Photo 4: Melissa Lee
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