In Saniya’s Salon, a mother-daughter story takes shape on stage

Today, the lights will go up in Saybrook Underbook to reveal posters of Bollywood stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai lining the walls, a cash register clothed in a patterned textile, and two salon chairs in the center of the stage. The set evokes a space of community gathering for many South Asian women: the beauty salon. 

Saniya’s Salon opens on Thursday the 26th at 8 PM. It will run through Saturday, with showtimes on Friday at 8 PM and Saturday at 2 and 8 PM. Written by Aanika Eragam YC ’26, the play threads together themes of identity and belonging in diaspora communities through the relationship between a mother and a daughter. 

Set in Georgia, the play follows Ritu, played by Leila Hyder YC ’28. Ritu owns a waxing salon, which becomes a site for conceptualizing diaspora politics, including classism, casteism and colorism, through two generations of women. As the story unfolds, the mother and daughter navigate their competing visions of the world, their own conceptualizations of the self, and above all, their relationship with each other.

For Eragam, the play is deeply personal. She grew up going to a salon by the same name in Georgia, tucked into a complex with other South-Asian-owned businesses.

“It’s our little India,” Eragam said of the area, joking also about its proximity to Costco.

In writing Saniya’s Salon, Eragam interviewed the mother and daughter at the real salon, learning how the family business held different significance for each. She described the mother’s hope for her daughter to take over the salon, and the daughter’s own desire to forge a different path for herself. These conversations became invaluable as Eragam conceptualized what Ritu might have imagined when she came to America, and how that shapes her interactions with Saniya. 

Eragam wrote Saniya’s Salon for a class she took in Fall of 2024, Production Seminar: Playwriting. It took shape under the guidance of her professor, Deborah Margolin, and through feedback from her classmates. Amongst those peers was Edie Wolfe Lipsey YC ’26, who is directing the play.

Last Winter, Eragam submitted the play to the Yale Playwrights Festival. It was accepted, and she workshopped it with two mentors. In February 2025, she held a reading that Hyder participated in. Although Eragam did not plan to stage the play when she first wrote it, she soon realized that she might never have another chance to.

Eragam described a meeting with Lipsey over dinner, where she asked her former classmate to direct the play.

Lipsey was honored by the request, but she questioned whether she was the “right person” to bring it to life. Ultimately, the pair decided to capitalize on the rare opportunity for a director and playwright to work in tandem. While Lipsey directed the play, Eragam served as its assistant director.

“I think we both felt we understood each other well enough to collaborate and to deliver this story in a way that would be meaningful,” Lipsey said.

Both she and Eragam emphasized the universal resonance of the play’s themes which, told through a South Asian lens, become glimpses into the negotiations between Indian immigrants and their children.

Describing the salon as a space in America where the diaspora recreates home in a new world, Eragam explored how inequalities in the motherland manifest in the U.S., including how they are inherited or challenged by the children of immigrants. She found herself writing about what it means to grow up internalizing one set of ideals from family and another from the outside world.

Thinking about beauty and identity, Eragam wrote Saniya as a spirited young teenager who wants to “experience life” but often feels like the way she is perceived in the U.S. pushes those desires “out of reach.” For Eragam, that sense of disbelonging came into sharper focus in college, which she described as a “second coming-of-age.”

After growing up in a community of South Asians, Eragam found herself at a predominantly white institution where she took classes about postcolonialism yet struggled to reconcile “theory and feeling,” a push-and-pull that has characterized her time at Yale.

“There’s very few people with the same passions who look like me,” said Eragam, noting the difficult transition from being surrounded by South Asians in Georgia.  

She said she still worries about pursuing a creative career as an Indian woman trying to write stories about a community she fears growing disconnected from.

“What if my life comes to a point where I’m never around South Asian people, and I’m still writing all this South Asian art but there’s a big disconnect?” Eragam questioned.

But in staging Saniya’s Salon, she has discovered a community of South Asian creatives while bringing newcomers to the theater space.

Zoya Haq YC ’27, who plays Saniya, had never acted before this experience. When casting changes left Geethika, Ritu’s sister-in-law and business partner, without an actor, Baani Kaur joined the cast all the way from New York. The NYU Tisch student commuted into New Haven for rehearsals and memorized her lines in the span of two weeks.

“They’ve been showing up and they’re excited about the play,” Eragam gushed about the cast. She called the opportunity of working with individuals new to theater space, specifically, “beautiful.”

In transporting her words from the page and onto the stage, Eragam realized she had found exactly the kind of space she had long yearned for. 

“That’s what I love uniquely about theater,” said Eragam. “You need all these people to make it happen.”

For Eragam, those collaborators were the play’s cast and crew, friends and family, classmates and professors. 

Shiva Sai Ram Urella, who joined Yale in the Fall as the university’s first Telugu instructor, coached the actors in Saniya’s Salon through the pronunciation of their Telugu lines. He also helped Eragam craft the Telugu dialogue for her senior thesis play. Playing on the term “B to B,” which references direct interactions between businesses, Eragam’s Back to Bangalore follows four Indian men in the 1990s who work at a tech office during the Y2K era. Hired to fix the world’s computers amidst fears about a programming bug expected to wreak havoc when systems shift from 1999 to 2000, the men’s own personal worlds instead become the focus of the play.

Emphasizing the shifts in immigration policy surrounding South Asia, Eragam said Back to Bangalore is about a time when the American dream felt more palpable. Still, the men’s individual ambitions fracture as they come face-to-face with the realities of their new life in the U.S.

Both Saniya’s Salon and Back to Bangalore have shown Eragam that the creative spaces she wishes were more common are worth creating. Writing these spaces into existence has motivated her to continue following her creative impulses, finding peers along the way. 

“I hope they go on and do other creative things after Saniya’s Salon and are excited and invigorated by this experience,” Eragam reflected.

In staging the play, Eragam hopes to encourage more South Asians to pursue artistic projects, from cast members to her future audiences. Eragam described Saniya’s Salon as a sort of “litmus test,” through which she could discern how writing fits into her career, if at all. Although she had doubts going into the experience, Eragam said she has no regrets.

“I wish I had been doing this all of my time at Yale,” she concluded.

The reporter, Kamini Purushothaman, is also involved in Saniya's Salon as the play's Costume Designer.