An Indian American woman gives birth to a child in Chicago in 2006. Eighteen years later, she meets the child again, now a teenager preparing to leave for college. In ‘Labor Day Reunion’, a two-act memory play set across two nights, Kolkata-based playwright and director Ahon Gooptu traces how that child irrevocably reshapes the lives of three adults — the biological mother, the father, and the surgical nurse who delivers the baby — whose lives are intertwined in more ways than one.

Written and developed between 2019 and 2022, the play follows Sachi (Dana Roy), Josh (Aditya Krishnan), and Amari (Palashh Chaturvedi) as they negotiate their relationships with one another and with Jamshed (Eeshan Chatterjee), the child at the centre of the story. Each arrives carrying emotional baggage. Sachi and Josh have been close friends for years, but are not romantically involved. Josh, a bisexual man, had planned to adopt the child conceived during a one-night stand with Sachi and raise them with his then-partner, until that relationship fell apart. Sachi, meanwhile, remains uncertain about co-parenting. Amari, a queer Muslim surgical nurse, enters the delivery room while wrestling with anxieties about his family’s precarious future in the United States. From this intimate premise, Gooptu builds an expansive meditation on queerness, migration, belonging, and the ways families are continually made and remade.

“When I started writing the play in 2019, I was following a very simple idea: what if there was a play called Labour Day where somebody was in labour? The central question then was: who has the final say over what happens to the baby once it is born?” Gooptu says. “The mother doesn’t really speak until page two or three. For a long time, all we hear is her breathing and heaving. That was intentional. The person who should have the most say in the room is the one who can’t speak. I wanted to play with the idea of who has the loudest voice and whose voice carries the most power or consequence in a situation like that.”

The play itself evolves much like the child at its centre. What begins as a story about birth gradually becomes one about parenthood, care, and agency. “When I started writing the second act, which explores what happens to the baby many years later, once they have a voice of their own, the question shifted,” Gooptu explains. “I became interested in what parenting really looks like. I had very different experiences of parenting through my mother and my father, so I wanted to place those experiences side by side and complicate them. I was exploring what a fractured relationship with a very present parent might look like for a child, and what parenting can mean when it comes from someone who isn’t your biological family.”

I watched the play on its final staging at The Urban Theatre Project in Kolkata. During a post-show conversation with Ahon, he pointed out that for many queer individuals, chosen family is a practical necessity, created in response to migration, social exclusion, or the limits of biological kinship. “Since I wrote this play I have moved one, two, three times, twice to two different states and cities in the US and another time back home to India and when I was coming home to India I was coming back, yes, to my family that I had sort of left seven years prior or to my neighbourhood, all of that, but at the same time I was coming back to an India that I had not grown up in. Section 377 was struck down while I was away in the US,” Ahon says.

“I didn’t really understand what it meant to live as an openly queer person in India until I moved back,” he says. “Everyone I had dated before had been in the US, so my experience of finding family beyond my biological family happened there — during college, graduate school, and later while I was working in New York. I found these small semblances of home through the communities, collectives, and theatre ensembles I was creating with. By the time I returned to India, I had learned what kind of work and environment made me feel most at home. Whether that sense of home comes from a place or even from my biological family now feels almost redundant. What matters is knowing the conversations I’m interested in having, the issues and values I hold close, and finding people with whom I can freely discuss, debate, and work through those questions together.”

‘Labor Day Reunion’ resists the urge to offer easy answers to these questions. It lingers in ambiguity, allowing conversations about adoption, intersex identity, queerness, migration, mental health, and post-biological relationships to emerge from deeply personal encounters among these four characters. The result is a work that seems less interested in representing identities than in asking what care looks like when conventional kinship structures begin to fail.

As the narrative advances in the second act, these questions evolve into an inquiry into parenting itself. ‘Labor Day Reunion’ repeatedly questions whether love, responsibility, and care are choices we make rather than inherit. The play’s emotional core lies in recognising that families are formed through sustained acts of trust, vulnerability, and mutual commitment.

Ahon Gooptu’s ‘Labour Day Reunion’ is now available as a book published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata.

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