Review of Keya Das's Second Act by Sopan Deb

*Keya Das's Second Act* by Sopan Deb (2022). Published by Simon & Schuster.

I saw this book first on someone’s Instagram feed in passing, and I was mesmerized by the cover. I’m someone who has worked in theatre for three years now, so the New York City theater scene has become something I’ve dearly loved in the past few years.

But when I sat down and read the actual synopsis of the book, I wanted to read it immediately.

As someone who has been studying Bangla and Bengali culture for two years now, I’ve tried to understand Bengali culture and community out of a pure love and fascination for the historic region of Bengal. I spend a lot of time in Jackson Heights, too, which makes me more compelled to pick up diaspora literature like this.

So I put in an order at my local library, sat down with the book when it arrived a couple of days later, and read it over the course of a few days. I will say, I did find some parts of it tough to read, but I am interested in the work this author does (and will do) in the future, so this book did succeed in that.

Onwards with the review!

Keya Das dies shortly after coming out to her parents, but when her play is found in the attic, she lives on in a different way.

This book begins several years after a family’s tragedy. A Bengali American family, the Das family, had their daughter Keya come out to them as gay. Her father, Shantanu, reacts poorly. Her mother kind of does too, but he ends up saying that she basically could be fixed and needs to see a psychologist.

He comes from an academic background and doesn’t understand his daughters that much, which prompted this kind of response, but it was clearly the wrong one as it deeply wounded Keya. She wasn’t reacting well to them in the days after that, and, not too long, she ends up getting into a car accident and dies. It is implied that she may have been hindered by her emotional state if I read into that correctly.

This event ends up destroying the family, and Shantanu and his wife end up getting divorced, and his daughter leaves them behind once she becomes a full grown adult.

Now forced to confront the circumstances of his life by himself, Shantanu is cleaning up the attic with his other daughter, who has barely spoken to him since, when they discover the unfinished manuscript of a play written by Keya and her girlfriend Pamela, who she was dating at the time. They are shocked to find this, as they knew Keya did theater, but not that she was a writer, too.

At first the idea of producing the play is mentioned in passing and isn’t something that seems like a realistic option, but it increasingly becomes one as the plot progresses. The other Das daughter, Mitali, is seeing a guy named Neel in the meantime who was a former Broadway drummer, but he got busted showing up on stage for a show while high on drugs.

That got him blacklisted from the industry, and he gets caught up in crime and almost serves time before being busted out by his friend’s dad’s lawyer friend. The two start dating, but that’s going to become ugly for everyone when they find out the truth of his background—he hides this fact when presenting himself to others.

It’s Neel, though, who cements the concept of putting this play on for the world to see. And when Mitali realizes this for herself, she tells her father, who in an attempt to connect to his lost daughter and reconcile with how he made her feel, decides he’s going to do everything.

The woman he’s dating draws on her connections to find him a Tony Award-winning director that has become a bit of a sellout recently, and Shantanu decides he will sell the house and everything he owns in order to fund the play. So begins the process of developing it for Off-Broadway.

He meets Pamela, who reveals she never told her parents she was gay when Keya did that same act, and convinces her to finish the play they had written together. She ends up agreeing, and joins in on the process. The odds were stacked against them at first, but it looks like this is going to happen.

His former wife, Chaitali, auditions to play the mother, and the actress who plays Keya is still in college. The parents of Pamela in the show are recruited from Broadway, and despite the massive paychecks they’re going to require, it seems like the show is going to be a hit. The book ends with the curtain rising, symbolizing a new life in a way.

Overall Thoughts

This is a decent book. I didn’t love it, which I kind of expected a couple of chapters into it, but I also didn’t think it was bad. I think there’s a lot of heart in this kind of story and the writing itself was smooth and flowing. I think I couldn’t connect with the story and what was going on, although I think it was a wonderful way to keep the daughter’s memory alive—I believe the root of my problem with all of this is how it ends up happening.

Sure, this is how some plays are produced, but most things don’t go straight to Off-Broadway like this. Some books you need to set aside the believability aspects, but some things mentioned in the book had question marks on my head on how they could even keep the lights on for just a couple of nights—theatre is immensely expensive. But all in all, it’s a pretty solid book.

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