A road-trip comedy exploring how families and values evolve across generations, as a mother and son navigate culture and identity in America.
Neha and Neel (नेहा और नील) runs at Seattle Public Theater from October 16 through November 8, 2026. It's a Seattle premiere from the same creative team behind the award-winning co-production House of Joy, presented by Pratidhwani and Seattle Public Theater.
The play is a road-trip comedy about how families and values evolve from one generation to the next. Neha fears she's failed to pass her language and culture on to her seventeen-year-old son, Neel, and a summer trip to visit colleges becomes her last chance to get him to see the historic Hope Diamond and witness a piece of Indian history for himself. From there, it asks what gets lost with every generation in America and whether it's ever too late to connect with your roots.
It's written by Ankita Raturi, a Queens-based writer and teaching artist whose hyper-theatrical works in English, Hindi/Urdu, and sometimes Bahasa Indonesia explore living between cultural identities and the legacies of colonization. She won a 2024 Los Angeles New Play Project Award and a 2022 Ollie Award. Agastya Kohli directs, and he's led the Drama Wing of Pratidhwani since 2005.
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The run goes from October 16 to November 8 at the Seattle Public Theater in Green Lake. Tickets are $10 to $100 on a sliding scale, and the show runs about an hour—the Thursday, October 29 performance is 7:30 to 8:30 PM, and the Sunday, October 25 matinee is 2:00 to 3:00 PM.
