Seventeen-year-old Shilpa Shah is the self-proclaimed Queen of the Remote Control in Sujata Bhatt's comedy of generational conflict and cultural identity.

Premiered by Los Angeles' East West Players in 2002, the play is enjoying a modest, amusing Houston debut, courtesy of Shunya, a volunteer theater troupe dedicated to portraying the South Asian-American experience.

The Shahs are a wealthy, first-generation immigrant family whose lifestyle in California's San Fernando Valley is light-years from the parents' roots in India.

Father Ashok and mother Divya are both doctors, though at home they conform to the fussy-mom, irascible-dad stereotypes of the TV shows Shilpa watches constantly. Though they decry TV's influence on Shilpa, the parents also have fallen under its pervasive influence. At one point, Divya drives home an ultimatum to her daughter by humming the Jeopardy "ticking clock" theme.

Besides TV, visits to the mall and seaweed facials, Shilpa's preoccupation is filling out college applications. She wants to go to New York's Columbia. Dad wants her to stay in California and go to Stanford, where her older brother Nitin is a medical student. Exasperated at her parents' efforts to "control her life," Shilpa escapes into fantasies of dictating the family's life using the remote control. She can stop, start, re-wind or switch to a new program such as an interview in which Shilpa grills her parents about their marriage.

 This novel angle is an embellishment rather than the main plot. In Act 2, Shilpa's TV fantasies and conflicts with her parents take a back seat to the arrival of Nitin and his bride-to-be, a debate about Nitin's career plans, then a revelation about the parents' own cultural identities.

Most of the script's observations on parent-child relations and cultural clashes are familiar, even predictable. A typical exchange: "Stop treating me like a 2-year-old." "Stop acting like a 2-year-old."

Yet, while uneven, the script also has effective moments, both comic and dramatic. As directed by Anil and Rathna Kumar, this low-key rendition is at times enjoyable, if never polished. A more unified overall playing style and brisker pick-up of lines would help, but there are bright spots in the playing nonetheless. Confidence improves as the performance progresses.

In the two pivotal roles, Nadia Ali and Yaksha Bhatt convey the basic daughter-mother dynamics; Ali reveling in Shilpa's adolescent impatience and sarcasm; Bhatt excelling at Divya's well-meaning meddling and bright-eyed delight at the prospect of planning her son's wedding.

Ranga Nathan's Ashok could be more expressive and animated, but he carries a certain cranky paternal authority. Jay Raman makes Nitin a laid-back regular guy, but is not entirely believable as a hospital tycoon in the making. Sara Kumar is poised if a bit too placid as Nitin's unflappable fiancee.

Showing a young theater group of some promise, Remote Control may have you wishing to "fast-forward" now and again. But it never makes you hit the "off" button.