Dev D actress Kalki Koechlin turns playwright with a new play, Skeleton Woman, that she has co-written with actor Prashant Prakash. She tells What's On why it took more than winning the Metroplus Award to convince filmmaker boyfriend Anurag Kashyap to produce it

The first time Kalki Koechlin (seen as Chanda in Anurag Kashyap's Dev D) and Prashant Prakash auditioned for their play Skeleton Woman, they did not make the mark. The audition was for Thespo, India's platform for youth theatre, and their work wasn't ready to be staged yet. Kalki was in the throes of Dengue, the script was unfinished and both, Prakash and Kalki, didn't find themselves in a position to take their project to an audience.

Months of re-writing, fine-tuning, and finding themselves a director (documentary filmmaker Nayantara Kotian) later, Skeleton Woman wowed the Thespo jury, and is being staged at the festival's monthly showcase of youth theatre.

How did the two of you come together to script the play?
Kalki: I came across an Inuit mythological tale in a book I was reading called, Women Who Run with the Wolf. The story dealt with the emotions of a woman, and I was gripped. Incidentally, Prashant and I took a workshop with Anamika Haskar a few days later, where we were asked to work with a few scripts she handed out to us. Ironically, I was given the same story the myth of the skeleton woman, and I began rewriting it at the workshop. Haskar read my work and told me not to give it up. Six months later, I started writing the scenes, and sent the script to Prashant for his feedback.

Prashant: Even though we worked on this for the longest time, we never sat in the same room. Kalki would work on it and send the script over to me. I'd add some more to it, make changes and send it back for her to review. Slowly, the work evolved into an hour-long play and that's when we came together to finish the script.