Shekinah Jacob

Shekinah Jacob is an Indian playwright who has appeared in Edinburgh Fringe and worked with the Royal Court Theatre.

Her plays include Ali J, The Long Way Home, and Queen of Hearts. She is also known for a monologue she presented on BBC radio titled We are Water. Jacob runs the New Zealand and Bangalore-based theatre company Open House Productions that has performed over 60 shows of short plays for corporates, conferences, and various institutions across the world.

Early life
In an interview with The Hindu, Jacob said that playwriting came naturally to her when she was a child. According to Jacob, after graduating from the Women's Christian College she went on to work as a reporter, copywriter and technical writer at various times. Jacob is married and has two kids.

Education
Jacob attended Ida Scudder School, a secondary school in Vellore. She graduated from the Women's Christian College, a women's college associated with the University of Madras, from which she holds a master's in English Literature. Jacob holds a master's in writing for performance from the University of London as a Charles Wallace scholar, and a PhD in theatre from the University of Victoria.

Career
Jacob wrote her second full-length script while studying at Women's Christian College. But she learnt the fundamentals of playwriting during a workshop by Mahesh Dattani and was later trained by the Royal Court Theatre in London.She says about her experience in her interview with 'The Hindu' "I learnt how drama is action. Cause and effect. Your left brain and right brain have to work together.” In WCC she had to write a play with no male actors in it. So she wrote a play with 7 girls in it, Seven for a Secret, and it was this play that got her into a workshop with the Royal Court Theatre, London. The play was performed in Chennai and won the Best Script prize and Best Audience Response prize.

She participated in a playwriting workshop by Mahesh Dattani and the play she wrote at the end of this Only Women, had a rehearsed reading at the British Council.

She also wrote a monologue, We are Water, that was broadcast on BBC radio in September 2003.

Her play The Long Way Home was performed at the NCPA, Prithvi in Mumbai and the Museum Theatre in Chennai.

Her play Ali J began with a real story. Her brother is a lawyer who works with a human rights organisation in Mumbai. He told her about a young man who was imprisoned because drugs were planted in his bag. The man spent 10 years in a Mauritius prison, and then was moved to Mumbai. Around the same time, she was asked to write a monologue for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. "They originally wanted one on Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and realizing how little Indian history she knew, she began to read extensively on the subject." After six months of reading, she decided to morph the two subjects. The play premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and ran for 25 days. It will open the NCPA Centrestage Festival in Mumbai next, after which it will tour the country.

Talking about her inspiration in an interview with "The Indian Express" on 25 October 2013 Jacob said, "I read as widely as possible– my favorite playwrights include Alan Bennett for the brilliant way in which he captures miniature shifts of mood and the textured dynamics of relationships, also Tom Stoppard and David Mamet. And of course the immortal Shakespeare," she says. According to Jacob, good theatre is like a good democracy, 'by the people, of the people, and for the people'. She writes what she would like to watch as an audience. ''She enjoys watching plays that are rooted in her world. Theatre should be like an ongoing dialogue between the audience and the actors.''

Shekinah Jacob started a theatre group, Open House Productions. It operates on a Robin Hood model, funded by corporates and well-wishers, while most of the revenue from ticket sales go to local NGOs.

In an interview in 2015, playwright Naren Weiss told India-West that his play Censored came to him after Jacob's Ali J had been banned in multiple cities across India. The play was later shot as a sketch by the Stray Factory and went viral in India.

Theatre

 * Ali J – Premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for a three-week run in August 2013 as a Richard Jordan and Evam Entertainment Production.
 * The Long Way Home – Produced by Evam Entertainment and directed by Karthik Kumar, with shows at Mumbai, Chennai & Bangalore.
 * We are water – This monologue was broadcast on BBC radio in 2003.
 * Seven For a Secret – Won the Best Script prize and Best Audience Response prize at an inter-collegiate theatre festival
 * Only Women - this had a rehearsed reading in the British Council.
 * Goeing 747 – A comic re-telling of the Christmas story, performed in 2012