Cool Pods and Hot Ideas: The Making of Fever Dream
- harshini08
- Nov 23
- 6 min read
Fever Dream is fun, it’s silly, it’ll have you laughing and occasionally gasping, and at the same time, it’ll have you think a little bit more about the good and not-so-good ways in which we are adapting to rising temperatures.
A conversation between co-writer and director Meghana AT and co-writer Nayantara Nayar on everything Fever Dream.
Prologue
Our story begins in 2022. Nayantara has written ‘The Body’, a digital play. Meghana watches
it, and declares it is one of the best plays she’s watched in Covid times. A few months later,
Meghana and Nayantara are in the same Zoom room – no one remembers what that was
for. Nayantara then reaches out to Meghana, because she’s writing her PhD about water
crises and theatre, and someone mentioned Meghana’s show Plan B/C/D/E about flooding
in Mumbai. They meet online, gush over each other’s work, and then don’t speak much for a
while.
Cut to 2025. The folks at Asar (a climate justice startup) reach out to Meghana and ask her
to write a play about rising heat. We all know about global warming, but we rarely engage
with it beyond the news, or the passing “uff it’s getting hotter and hotter every year!”. Asar
hopes that in collaborating with tafreehwale, (Meghana’s theatre company), we can get a
room full of people to engage with rising temperatures more meaningfully, such that we
realize that this is more than just a passing nuisance.
Meghana jumps at the opportunity! And jumps straight into the pit of self-despair. What does she want to write about? Can she write a script?? She’s only ever made experimental work before! SHE NEEDS HELP!
One evening, she attempts to escape the despair by attending Bhasha Centre’s ‘Natak Express’, a collection of plays written and devised in just 24 hours.
The emcee reads out Nayantara’s bio, she’s a playwright interested in writing about climate
and the metaphorical tubelight goes off in Meghana’s head. In the metro on the way home,
she impulsively asks Nayantara if she’d co-write this script. Nayantara is knee-deep in PhD
crisis mode, one month from her submission date. She decides that what she needs as a
distraction from her very important work is… more work. A new play. “So long as it’s not
about water!” And so they decided to write a script together.
The Process
A Google Meet Room. Nayantara has two screens – one desktop with the script, a Miro
board, other Google Documents for research etc. Meghana has a single laptop with split
screen enabled – the Meeting sits on the right side of her screen, while the document they
are currently working on sits on the left. The two watch each other write, chat, bitch about
the world, and briefly, write a script. They get down to business, reflecting on what this
collaborative process was like.
Meghana: It was extremely scary to begin with-
Nayantara: It was a relief! Why was it scary?
Meghana: Because I was nervous about writing a script (something I haven’t done before), I
hardly knew you, and I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to write. Then again, I guess that
newness really helped the process, because neither of us had very fixed ideas of what the
play should be. Why was it a relief for you?
Nayantara: Because when you start a script you can feel this huge sense of responsibility –
‘What is it about? Are you doing enough research? Will you get this right?’ – but with Fever
Dream, from the start, it always felt like you and I would share that responsibility. That meant
it took us much less time to really look at the area we were writing about and find the
questions we wanted to ask with the play.
Meghana: Fortunately, both of us have similar tastes – we love irony, em dashes (AI will not
be able to steal those away from us), we have similar ideas of what climate activism and
climate art can look like. The challenge was that both of us have opposing self-sabotaging
tendencies. I prefer to stay the course so that we can meet the deadline with minimal hectic
re-creation, while you prefer to re-write/re-structure if that’s what best serves the story.
Nayantara: Yeah that was a challenge, but I guess it’s because we essentially find different
aspects of theatre making challenging? Which meant we learned a lot from each other, and
could depend on each other to keep things in balance.
Meghana: So cowriting meant fewer breakdowns, more support, and an overall richer story because of the mixing of perspectives. This did mean that finding The Story was a journey
with many many turns. It started with a Cool Room – a municipal ordained space where
people could escape a heat wave. Then it became about the tragedy of a heatwave hitting a
Cool Room that fails. But this wasn’t quite it either. So then we really had to think about what
we wanted to say.
Nayantara: Without giving away too much, I think we both started this process wanting a
play that made audiences care more about climate change and to think about how heat is
directly and indirectly affecting their lives. The fact that it’s getting hotter every summer, that
the monsoons are irregular, that winters are shorter, this stuff isn’t normal. The play also
needed to be fun, relatable and talk about how we’re thinking about solutions to climate
change.
Meghana: Finally, Nayantara thought of a reality TV contest called ‘Tech Fever’ and then
came the Cool Pods for a Cool Future. A Cool Pod is meant for one person to enter, briefly
receive some cooling, get well rested, and then leave to return to work! Brilliant, isn’t it? A
way to keep the machine running! Along the way we wrote up approximately 8-9 characters,
though only 4 made it into the play.
Nayantara: We have Viren, an IIM grad/serial entrepreneur who’s convinced that he can
win Tech Fever with the Cool Pods. There’s Shree, a business woman who believes that
Cool Pods will revolutionise factory floors. And Deepak, an aspiring actor, who cares little
about Cool Pods but is extremely excited about being on TV.
Meghana: I love the characters we’ve come up with, because each of us has met someone
exactly like them. I don’t particularly like any of them as people, I don’t want to be like them,
but unfortunately, at different times, I’ve been Viren, Shree, and Deepak, and I think a lot of
people in the audience can relate to that. And that’s what we can do with theatre, right? Call
people in/ call ourselves out, but in a fun way. That’s one of the strengths of theatre.
Nayantara: Yeah, even when people do think about climate change and the effect that
human activities are having on the world, it can seem like such a huge, unreachable
problem. ‘What can you or I do about it? It’s best left to people who know…’ That can be
how a lot of people think. If there’s one thing theatre is really good at – it is good at many things – it’s at taking those kinds of big, out of reach problems and getting people to think
about them and care about them and reflect on what those things mean in their lives and
communities.
Meghana: Just think of all the great plays out there that are about mad kings and queens,
war and death, disease… things that seem so big compared to our everyday lives are
brought to us and made tangible enough for us to be able to consider it. So theatre is
actually a perfect medium for talking about climate change.
Nayantara: And that’s why people should watch the play?
Meghana: Yes! Look, we know you’re all exhausted reading about the awful things going on
in the world. When we battle traffic and terrible roads and clashing schedules to go watch a
play, we don’t want to be lectured. So Fever Dream is fun, it’s silly, it’ll have you laughing
and occasionally gasping, and at the same time, it’ll have you think a little bit more about the
good and not-so-good ways in which we are adapting to rising temperatures.
Come see for yourself!
Fever Dream is on at the G5A Black Box
On 30th November at 7pm
Tickets on Altshows
About the piece:
The world is getting hotter, and the time to act is NOW. But what if there was a tech
innovation that could combat the blistering heat of global warming?
On the sets of a tech talent show, Viren, Shree, and Deepak are all set to bring such an
innovation to life: Cool Pods that can make the world a better, cooler place. What’s the grand
prize? A 2 crore seed fund and saving millions of lives.
Will they succeed in their mission or will global warming win the battle? This satire drama will
have you reconsidering your future in the climate crisis.
Team
co-writer/director/producer: Meghana AT
co-writer: Nayantara Nayar
production manager: Harshini Misra
stage manager: Abhishek Patil
light designer: Swachchhand
lights at G5A: Yael Crishna
music & sound designer: Adriel George
costume designer: Kalansh Gala
set designer: Tanushree Kotekeriyana
visual designer: Gurmeet Kaur
Cast:
Shivani Tanksale
Sahir Mehta
Jayesh Vavhal
Mallika Shah (voice)
Vivek Madan (voice)
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