Thus we look beyond the story here for an impetus to make us stretch our minds. To think about the social calamity of cracked identities-loyal divisions and divided loyalties, fractured fictions and fictional fractures. This is the one interpretive stratum our emergent performance text that will, we wistfully hope, add to the already rich written dramatic text, and, as with any production, contribute some ancillary meaning to it. Hayavadana reflects India's colonial heritage, offering a mix of Western and Indian theatrical traditions. Such a circumspect history is reflected in both the style and conventions of the play which offer an Indian aesthetic and also Western theatrical techniques which are sometimes themselves rooted in Indian performance.
Indian drama offers a different aesthetic approach from much of Western theatre.
With Indian plays, storytelling is the focus as opposed to the action of the story and often the action is described to the audience rather than depicted in the realist mode of most Western performance. At the heart of Sanskrit aesthetics is rasa, a flavor or essence that acts as the aesthetic guide for the performance. There are eight types of rasas that include both emotions, such as rage and terror, and dramatic types, such as comic and erotic, among others. Rasa transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, which is achieved through the performance that brings the performer and the informed audience together. The closest Western comparison to rasa is Aristotle's notion of catharsis, but rasa goes beyond this dramatic outcome by incorporating and producing more than just fear and pity.