About the Play:

Winner of the OBIE and Vernon Rice Awards.

The Indian Wants the Bronx is a one-act drama by Israel Horovitz. A resounding Off-Broadway success, The Indian Wants the Bronx is a short and unsettling that play explores anti-South Asian racism. Gupta, the Indian of the title, has just arrived in New York City from his native country to visit his son and speaks only a few words of English. While waiting for a bus to the Bronx, he is approached by two young, loud thugs who begin teasing him. Name-calling taunts eventually result in acts of rage and violence.

The Indian Wants the Bronx tells of wise cracking hoodlums Joey and Murph, both on probation, who wander the streets of New York looking for kicks. Gupta has just arrived from India to visit his son and finds himself lost on his first day in New York City. Joey and Murph spot him waiting at a lonely bus stop. He cannot understand English, and the boys have some fun at his expense – at least it starts out as fun. But little by little, as the minutes go by and the bus doesn't come, they get bored; then annoyed; then vicious. It is the very pointlessness of their brutality that makes the play – with its awful final image of Gupta jabbering into a dead phone – so disturbing. We are convinced that this is exactly what would happen at this particular bus stop on this particular night; we see, again, that violence in the big city is fuelled by boredom as much as by anger. And, as the nightmare spell of the play takes hold, and the boys torture their victim with increasing relish, we are brought to a shocking awareness of how thin the veneer of civilization can be – of how close beneath the surface of all men lurks the primitive impulse to hurt and humiliate those whose very helplessness and inability to communicate can only frustrate and enrage.

The Indian Wants the Bronx premiered in 1966 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. It opened in 1968 (in tandem with It's Called the Sugar Plum) at the Astor Place Theatre off-Broadway in New York City. It enjoyed an extended run of over 175 performances, won the OBIE Award for Best Off-Broadway Play and launched the acting careers of future Hollywood stars Al Pacino (OBIE Award for Best Actor) and John Cazale (OBIE Award for Best Supporting Actor), who would later appear as brothers in The Godfather. The play was mounted by the Chicago theatre company Steppenwolf as part of its first full season in 1976. It has been performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 3 male

What people say:

"The best Off-Broadway play of the season." — New York Times

"Horovitz uncovers that most careful thread of insight – that violence partakes equally of ignorance and fear." — Showcase 1

About the Playwright:

Israel Horovitz (1939-2020) was an American playwright, director, and actor who first came to prominence in the counterculture melting pot of Greenwich Village in the winter of 1967-68, with four critically acclaimed plays produced Off Broadway. Since then, nearly 70 Horovitz plays have been performed throughout the USA, and dozens have been translated and performed in as many as 25 languages, worldwide. He won numerous awards, including the OBIE (twice), the Emmy, Priz du Plaisir de theatre (for Line In Paris), Prix du Jury (Cannes Film Festival), the New York Drama Desk Award, and Award in Literature of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Eliot Norton Prize, and many others.