By Kerry Reid
Copyright chicagoreader
Lavina Jadhwani built what was by any measure an admirable career on Chicago stages and beyond. Locally, she directed for a range of companies large and small, including Silk Road Rising (now Silk Road Cultural Center), Writers Theatre, Oak Park Festival Theatre, and Rasaka Theatre Company. Nationally, her productions could be seen at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida, and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Her adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol also graced the Guthrie stage every year starting in 2021 and returns this season.
But her death on September 10 from cancer (she was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017) blew a hole in the heart of the theater community here and across the country not just because of her talent, but because of the way she advocated for and encouraged others, in and outside of the rehearsal room, especially (but not only) artists of South Asian ancestry.
Jadhwani was the first artistic director for Rasaka, which specialized in stories from the South Asian diaspora and was the first theater company in the midwest with that focus. She was raised in Hinsdale by parents who immigrated from India. Her mother, Chandra, is a physical therapist and her father, Chander, is an engineer. As reported by Rohan Preston of the Minnesota Star Tribune, Jadhwani directed her first play—Inherit the Wind—while a student at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora. She went on to earn an undergraduate degree in scenic design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she also earned a master’s degree in arts management. She earned her MFA in directing at the Theatre School at DePaul University, where she also taught.
Director Jonathan Berry recalls that he first met Jadhwani when he was directing James E. Grote’s adaptation of Daniel Mason’s 2002 novel, The Piano Tuner, for Lifeline Theatre in 2007. The story is largely set in Burma and has several South Asian characters. Berry realized he needed to draw on someone from a South Asian background to help with “things that I did not have any sort of business sort of speaking about directly” in the script. He describes his first meeting with Jadhwani, who had already sent her resume to Lifeline, as “a blind theater date that ended up going really, really well. All the things that are wonderful about her were present in that first interaction. She was incredibly smart about text and about bringing things back to the text and making sure that everything was sort of coming from there. But also incredibly gracious in the sharing of her knowledge about culturally what we were doing.”
On a Facebook post, Jadhwani’s friend and collaborator, Chicago actor and director Andrew Behling, quoted her as saying, “Treat Shakespeare like they’re new plays, treat new plays like they’re Shakespeare.” Jadhwani often directed Shakespeare and other classics, but always with an eye to how the work should be viewed through contemporary lenses. In a 2020 HowlRound interview with fellow director and writer Holly L. Derr, Jadhwani discussed “Dismantling Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in Shakespeare: A Field Guide,” which she created to help others find ways to stage Shakespeare while being conscious of potentially anti-Black language.
As she told Derr, “Because I’m primarily writing for non-Black directors and educators, we have to own that we don’t have the relationship to these words that the Black community does, and we have to use more care. Some of these words aren’t ours anymore. The other reason I created this document is that I’m not part of an institution right now, and I thought, what change can I advocate for? As a recent breast cancer survivor and somebody who’s in regular contact with her parents who are in their seventies, I’m not going to in-person protests right now. And that’s hard, because I want to be. Creating this document is a thing I can do right now that I didn’t see anybody else doing.”
Remaking classics through diverse lenses became a hallmark of Jadhwani’s work. During the pandemic, she worked with Salt Lake City-based writer Melissa Leilani Larson on a livestreaming version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that included BIPOC and nonbinary cast members. As she told the Readerʼs Catey Sullivan, “Austen, Shakespeare, Chekhov—I’m attracted to the Western canon, even though I know that as a femme of color they weren’t written for me as either a character or even as someone in the audience. I can’t tell you how many times during auditions I heard someone say they hadn’t been all that familiar with Austen because they knew there was nothing in it for them.”
In an email, South Asian director Reena Dutt, who first started working with Jadhwani during the pandemic and directed a virtual production of Jadhwani’s play The Sitayana (or “How to Make an Exit”) with East West Players, said of her late friend and colleague, “Lavina was the kind of person who elevated others with ease, she generously connected strangers and envisioned future partnerships outside of herself. She spoke up for those with less power. She was a true leader and friend. Lavina defines community, and built one on a global scale. Chicago was so lucky to have her as part of their fabric, but her impact is with no doubt global.”
My inbox overflowed in the days following Jadhwani’s passing with similar tributes to her generosity, especially with younger or emerging artists. Director Korey Pimental wrote, “Lavina started as my script analysis teacher at DePaul when I was an MFA Acting student there. She immediately began to encourage me to pursue directing in addition to acting. . . . She coached me on the audition that would end up being my acting debut in the city. When I told her that I wanted to set acting aside and pivot to directing, she immediately said, ‘great, want to direct a reading of my adaptation of Three Sisters?’ It was a no-brainer to her to show up for her friend in a way she knew she could.”Meredith Ernst, an actor who mostly works now as a text coach for Shakespeare, wrote, “Before I met Lavina, I had heard from around 20 people that if I loved Shakespeare, I needed to know her.” She added, “Those that know me know I never have less than five projects floating around in my mind at a time. Of course, they’re all adaptations of Shakespeare. The thing is, I’ve never been able to take that next step and talk about them with any theaters. So, when I have talked about these projects around friends, it’s always been in the hypothetical. ‘If I do this,’ or ‘if this happens,’ or ‘if I get the courage.’ When this occurred around Lavina, she would always lovingly interrupt and say, ‘you mean, ‘when.’’”
One of Ernst’s projects is slated to go up in 2027. “It’s largely because of her. She never gave up on me.”
Performer and business consultant Annie P. Ruggles wrote, “Lavina was equal parts warm and fierce and directed both to making theatre a more powerful, inclusive, and transformative place for ALL people.”
The Chicago Inclusion Project, for whom Jadhwani served as a board member and longtime sounding board, wrote a tribute to her for their newsletter. “She was one of our greatest champions and a true leader, behind the table as a director, behind a computer as a playwright, and in every room as a mentor to so many. . . . She believed everyone belonged in the room, regardless of background, experience and formal training. She reframed the classics and rewrote the narrative for a roomful of people who had not felt welcome in those spaces before.”I didn’t know Jadhwani well outside of saying hello at shows, but she did speak to a class I taught on reviewing the arts at Columbia College Chicago several years ago, where I was struck by how adroitly she could combine passionate calls for inclusion and respect for diverse artists with an understanding of the skills needed to call people in, as well as call them out.
If I recall correctly, at the time that she spoke to my class, there had been a recent controversy in Chicago theater over a Bollywood-style production of Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson’s musical Pippin at now-gone Circle Theatre in Forest Park that failed to incorporate any South Asian artists, onstage or off. Jadhwani was vocal about that production, and she also spoke up at a 2016 community meeting when Porchlight Theatre cast a non-Latine actor as Usnavi in their production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. As reported by the Readerʼs Aimee Levitt, Jadhwani, who at the time was Lifeline’s casting director, said, “You need to ask, ‘Who is making the decisions?’ And ‘Who is being paid?’”
Jadhwani also spoke up about Michael Halberstam, the founder and former artistic director of Writers Theatre who resigned in 2021 after a wave of allegations about sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct. In a public Facebook post in November 2020, Jadhwani wrote, “Though I believe in forgiveness and second chances, I also know that when people show you who they truly are, you should believe them.”
Speaking up as a freelance artist about abuses in institutions with hiring power takes courage and character. But Jadhwani, as so many people shared in social media posts over the past week, was mostly about the joy of being an artist and working with others. For the many people who worked with and loved Jadhwani, she showed them a way of making art that was openhearted and thoughtful as well as just plain fun and engaging. As her friend Jessica Maynard told me in an email accompanying several lovely photos she took of Jadhwani, “Lavina brought people together. She introduced me to the man who would become my husband. She’d call it ‘good casting.ʼ”
She also played matchmaker for theaters and playwrights by championing new work, and by serving on the board of the National New Play Network (NNPN). Nan Barnett, NNPN’s executive director, met Jadhwani when she was part of the National Directing Fellowship program (cosponsored by NNPN, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation).
Barnett says, “You know, the thing about Lavina is she never did anything halfway. So once she was an NNPNer, she was an NNPNer all in. She was just so excited about theater, specifically about new work and of course about adaptations. Her kind of big thing for us was the New Play Exchange [described by NNPN as ‘the world’s largest digital library of scripts by living writers’]. She just never stopped talking about it to everybody that she saw.” Barnett notes that when the Exchange opened its monologue bank to connect writers with actors, Jadhwani called her shortly after and said, “I just uploaded 20 new monologues.”
Jadhwani’s longtime friend Emjoy Gavino, founder of the Chicago Inclusion Project who organized a GoFundMe for Jadhwani after her cancer diagnosis, posted on Facebook an excerpt of Jadhwani’s play Ado, a “feminist reaction” to Much Ado About Nothing. (It is slated for a production opening in February 2026 at Indianapolis Shakespeare Company.)
Hero: Cousin, I will miss you most of all. I have learned so much from you. A wise woman once told me that anger can be a spark for change. I have seen you change much over the years and I love the woman that you have become.Beatrice: And I love the woman you have become. I am so happy that we get to share this day together.
In addition to her parents, Jadhwani is survived by a brother, Krish. There will be a celebration of life on Saturday, October 4, 11 AM–2 PM, at the Theatre School at DePaul University, 2350 N. Racine.
