Where is Your Husband?
Created and performed by Anshita Koul.
SoHo Playhouse | 15 Vandam St., New York, NY 10013
January 21, 2026 - February 1, 2026
In the intimate Huron Club at SoHo Playhouse, Where Is Your Husband? unfolds with a full house and a lively warmth that cuts through a cold January night. Before a word is spoken, the house music, an intentional mix of pop, rap, and dance, sets the tone. The audience is primed for reclamation, agency, and the right to define one’s own needs.
Created and performed by Anshita Koul and making its U.S. premiere direct from the Thessaloniki Fringe Festival, the hour long comedy storytelling piece centers on the question that has followed Koul across social media and life: Where is your husband? The speculation alone, was he lost, did he cheat, did he ever exist, reveals the cultural obsession embedded in the question itself. Koul knows the answer. Her therapist thinks it is time the world does too. And since she is childfree by choice, she jokes that she would like to pass this particular inheritance of trauma on to strangers. We thank her.
What follows is an act of brave, confessional storytelling that is deeply funny, disarmingly honest, and structurally precise. Born in India and now based in Berlin, Koul traces a life shaped by displacement, love, marriage, Complex PTSD, and generational trauma. She marks moments of rupture by age, mapping how trauma embeds itself quietly, especially within cultures that teach silence as survival. Do not talk about it. Do not go to therapy. Do not share secrets. You move on. You get educated. You marry. You continue the cycle. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
But Koul belongs to a generation that is interrupting that inheritance, and she does so with grit, obstinance, and humor. Stand up comedy and therapy become parallel tools of excavation. Her observations about Hindu rituals land sharply, with jokes that reframe red flags as fun facts early in relationships. These moments are laugh inducing and incisive because they are true. The comedy never undercuts the pain. It metabolizes it. There were many moments when I laughed, perhaps too loudly, out of recognition and identification with situations drawn from my own Indian family and community.
Perhaps most striking is her openness around suicidal ideation and attempts, subjects still rarely addressed with such clarity, particularly within South Asian contexts. Koul articulates a feeling many recognize but few name. Not wanting to die, but wanting to be dead. The paralysis of pain. The impossibility of just getting over it. These moments are handled with extraordinary care, never sensationalized, always grounded in lived truth.
Formally, Where Is Your Husband? leans more toward intimate solo performance than traditional stand up. There is a deliberate build, a sense of architectural control, and ultimately a reveal that feels earned rather than engineered. The revelation of Koul’s marital status is not simply informational. It is transitional and incredibly brave. To claim this truth publicly as a queer Indian woman, within and against the weight of cultural expectation, is an act of profound courage. The result is an unveiling that is both personal and political, touching on patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and casteism, without allowing any one system to flatten the specificity of her story.
By the end, the room feels changed. There are tears, yes, but also a deep sense of collective witnessing. This was Koul’s New York City debut, and she named the audience as family, a gesture we welcomed with open arms. Swaha.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Malini Singh McDonald.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on January 27th, 2026. All rights reserved.
