“I always feel like I crashed the theater party! I never went to drama school, never assisted anyone, never studied playwriting—so how did I make it to the party?” asks Mumbai-based writer, director, lyricist, and producer Shivani Tibrewala ’96. But even if she still can’t fully wrap her head around her rise on the Indian theater and cinema scene, after more than 500 performances of her plays and a bevy of screenplays for film and television, the results speak for themselves.

      The seeds for Tibrewala’s future success were planted early when, to avoid venturing out into the harsh New England winter, she auditioned for Taft’s production of Tina Howe’s Museum. Not only did she get a part in the play, but she was also brought on as assistant director. “We basically spent every evening in the Black Box for the next three months, and I just completely fell in love,” she says. “I loved being the assistant director. I loved acting. I loved the entire process. I didn’t know it then, but I had been bitten bad.” Shivani acknowledges her debt to Barc Johnson ’53, her creative writing teacher who was also her independent study project advisor and helped her put together her first book of poetry.

      After Taft, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, and though she tried her hand at biology and a premed track—and, as she adds, “approximately 17 other majors along the way”—she ultimately focused her studies on English literature. It was at Penn that she first encountered the work that changed her life: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. “It was alchemy. I knew that I could never unread it,” she says. The piece was such an inspiration that Tibrewala decided to write her own play for her senior thesis, adapting Tom Kromer’s 1935 novel Waiting for Nothing. “My thesis advisor was pretty worried since I hadn’t studied playwriting,” she admits, “but I told her that I would die if I had to write another analytical essay! I had watched and read a ton of plays. I felt like I understood the form, and I wanted to take the chance. She helped me stage a reading of the play in Philadelphia, the first public performance of my work.”

      Even after this watershed experience, after graduating and returning home to India, Tibrewala still wasn’t ready to commit to a life as a playwright. It took the tragedy of September 11th to finally compel her to pursue her true dreams. Looking back, she says, “I had friends in New York, and I remember thinking that I hadn’t written when I had the chance.” That very day, she quit her public relations job, embarked on a self-imposed sabbatical, and wrote her first original play, Whatever You Say. Within weeks, she was approaching actors, and soon the cast—including Tibrewala’s future collaborator and mentor and friend, celebrated Indian actor Tom Alter—was performing at the prestigious Prithvi Theatre Festival in Mumbai.

Tibrewala began producing work with her own theater company, No License Yet Productions. Initially wanting to focus on black comedy, she produced an original sociopolitical satire called Helpdesk and an adaptation of Italo Calvino’s short stories that she titled Raccontini. Three years later, she mounted one of her largest-scale undertakings, the genre-defying dance drama Staying Alive, about young people grappling with suicide, and it was this production that led the Indian Council of Cultural Relations to designate her as an official Empaneled Artist.

      Around the same time, Tibrewala made her first foray into screenwriting, penning the script for the short horror film Sex on the Beach that was released in theaters worldwide. In the years since, she has explored a wide variety of genres and formats, from documentaries to television series to feature films. She has also worked as content head for Indya.com and at NDTV Lumiere—a world cinema television channel.

      While she briefly stepped away from directing and producing to raise her son—a period during which she worked on writing and developing her own screenplays—she recently debuted as lyricist for the blockbuster movie musical Music School, which was released in theaters across India, the United States, Europe, and Australia earlier this year and is now available on streaming.

      For her, one of the greatest joys of writing is the opportunity to push boundaries and dive into a seemingly endless range of subjects—from feel-good romantic comedies to medical thrillers to existentialist meditations. And regardless of the story she’s telling, Tibrewala hopes that an inherent truthfulness remains at the core of her work. “I write from my soul. My work comes from deep within. There is no artifice,” she says. “The form is not as schooled because I’m unschooled, but in a way, I think that makes it resonate even more strongly with my audience—because it’s raw, and it’s honest.”