(Peter Filichia, Newark Star-Ledger) He’s not as famous as Shakespeare, but Dipan Ray believes that Rabindranath Tagore ought to be.

“Rabindranath Tagore was a playwright, a poet, a novelist, a composer, a singer, a choreographer and a painter,” says Ray.

“Not only that, he was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize in literature (in 1913). He even became a close friend of Albert Einstein.”

However, Tagore (1861-1941) isn’t much known in this country. Ray, the producing artistic director of the Epic Actors Workshop of Old Bridge, wants to change that. As a result, he’s made Rabindranath Tagore the focus of this weekend’s South Asian Theater Festival at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.