At a dimly lit black box theatre in Andheri, Kshitij sits on stage with nothing but a gut-punch of a story. No elaborate set. No background score. His voice, his body, his presence, leave the audience in stunned silence. This is not a scene from a grand theatre, but from the kind of raw, soul-baring performance that’s slowly becoming the heartbeat of a post-COVID theatre revival. Though alternative theatre has existed for centuries, across intimate venues like Harkat Studios, Veda Black Box, and pop-up rooms tucked between coffee shops and garages, it is now being reclaimed while being stripped-down, self-funded, and emotionally loaded. 

A recent Instagram reel by filmmaker Aditya Kripalani captured this quiet revolution, spotlighting how a post-pandemic wave of solo acts and two-person plays are redefining performance culture in Mumbai. “Theatre isn’t shrinking,” Kripalani says. “It’s reshaping itself. It’s adapting to survive.” 

“The OTT boom ended. Big producers stopped calling. Suddenly, no one wanted to fund a show that didn’t already have a star,” says Kripalani. After years in film, he found himself pulled toward the immediacy of intimate theatre. “There’s no gatekeeper between you and your audience. If the work is honest, it lands.” In Versova and Aram Nagar, often dubbed “Mumbai’s off-Broadway”, actors, writers, and directors are creating outside the commercial loop. With platforms for indie films drying up post-pandemic, and traditional stages like NCPA or even Prithvi often out of reach for newcomers, artistes began turning to black box and pop-up spaces not out of compromise, but necessity. Theatres like Harkat became havens where work could still breathe unfiltered, and unfunded.