I've grown accustomed to the idea that Lincoln Center Theater has a monopoly on New York premieres of Tom Stoppard plays. So it was a bit of a surprise to hear that his Indian Ink, which bowed on the London stage in 1995, is just now debuting in NYC at the modest Off-Off Broadway Walkerspace downtown. This is a production by a fairly new South Asian theater company called Alter Ego Productions, and it's an excellent match of company and play.

Indian Ink concerns a British poet named Flora Crewe who, in 1930, goes to India for the good of her health. There, she enchants men as varied as an earnest Englishman who courts her and the Rajah himself. She befriends Indian portrait painter Nirad [...]