By imposing environmental studies in educational curricula, the government aims to inculcate ecological consciousness into a nation that, from colonial times, discarded its traditional sensitivity to all forms of life. Despite the philosophical ideal of the tapovana, classical archetypes like Kalidasa’s Shakuntala or recent exemplars like Tagore, modern Indian artists have largely ignored environmental concerns. Despite such path-breaking “green” plays like Muktadhara, Bengali theatre has generally considered this subject as just a hobbyhorse of the privileged class.

Times change and a fresh generation takes over. Two new productions not only introduce natural history into their plots, albeit with uneven success, but also science fiction, another scarce ingredient in Bengali drama. In both, strikingly enough, women give birth to strange creatures from the plant and animal kingdoms respectively, signifying the next step in human devolution.

Ek Je Chhilo Briksha (picture), by Organization to Give Life a Meaning (from Bally, Howrah), combines two short stories: Shel Silverstein’s beautiful The Giving Tree and Anindya Sanyal’s Bikshubdha Aranya. Silverstein’s tree gives her human friend warmth throughout his life, even suggesting that he cut her down to make a boat to sail away, when he says he wants to go abroad. In Sanyal’s text, an Indian American botanist discovers a potent extract in a specimen of Adina cordifolia (keli-kadamb in Bengali, haldu in Hindi), which his boss orders him to exploit commercially in a joint venture. The fictitious part lies in the fact that the tree does not possess any greatly magical property known to science.

This is director Janardan Ghosh’s best effort so far, particularly in the resolution where a plant emerges from the American heroine, done imaginatively and tastefully. However, the mid-section, where a poverty-stricken Santal couple describes their hardships, digresses from the dramatic development.

In Nata-ranga’s Megapod (it should have been spelt “Megapode”), pregnant, urban women deliver a new generation of fully-grown, self-centred youth. The analogy is to megapodes, Australasian birds that break out of their eggs on their own without incubation, fully-formed and self-sufficient, able to eat and fly soon after hatching. We can understand the concept of a mutant species of inconsiderate humans populating the world, but Sohan Bandyopadhyay’s writing and directing skills are amateurish at present. Besides, the play gives the poor megapodes a bad name, given that they are cute and curious birds, with just one obscure species in India, on the Nicobar Islands. From all ornithological accounts, they seem quite gregarious and hardly monstrous.