Play is important, although Prabhupada enacted it

Satsvarupa Dasa: Prabhupada is seated in his room, talking with Prajapati dasa and his wife, who are leaders of a Krishna conscious dance and theater group. They are showing Prabhupada pictures of one of their performances in a temple. "Why are their backs to the Deities?" Prabhupada asked. "Because Jayatirtha said?" "Jayatirtha?" Srila Prabhupada said it in a way that obviously rejected their reply. He then asked that whatever GBC men were nearby should come at once to his room. When the men had gathered, Srila Prabhupada began lecturing to them on the point of not turning one's back to the Deity. "Rupa Gosvami has said, 'Do not turn your back to the Deity,' but now they say someone has said it is all right." Prabhupada looked around heavily to the devotees in the room. "This is the problem," he said. "We have so many big, big acaryas."

When a devotee began speaking and mentioned another one of Srila Prabhupada's leading disciples, Prabhupada immediately cut down, with a few words, both the devotee in the room and the person he had referred to. Then everyone was silent. Finally, a devotee asked, "Srila Prabhupada, what about women dancers onstage?" Earlier that day, a group of young women from a Bengali village had been dancing and playing mridanga in the temple and some of the devotees had questioned whether it was proper to watch them. Srila Prabhupada replied that women should not appear onstage for dramatic performances. Men should play the women's roles. He said that in India it was done that way previously; women's parts were played by boys. Only later were women introduced in the women's roles. Prabhupada said no respectable woman would do that, so they used prostitutes. Prabhupada continued speaking, outlining the history of Bengali drama. He then told the devotees about the time he had played in a drama about the life of Lord Caitanya.

It had been directed by a prominent figure in Bengali theater. Prabhupada described how when the play was finished, all the actors stood there but there was no applause. They looked out at the audience to see why there was no applause, and they saw that everyone was so moved by the story that they all had tears coming from their eyes. "That's because you were in the play, Srila Prabhupada" remarked a devotee. Prabhupada shook his head and made a typical wave of his hand, as if to dismiss the notion that the play was important because of him.