Design, Direction, and Music by Gowri Ramnarayan 

Featuring:  
PC Ramakrishna 
Anita Ratnam 
V Balakrishnan  
Akhila Ramnarayan  
Vasudev Menon 
Sunandha Ragunathan 
Vidyuth Srinivasan 
Aarabi Veeraraghavan  
Shreya Yadav 
Vinay Karthik  
Amitash Pradhan 
Sreekanth Sankardass  

Vocals:                             Amritha Murali, Swarnarethas 
Dance Choreography:        Sheejith Krishna 
Dancers:                           Anjana Anand, Sheejith Krishna 
Lights:                              Karm Chawla  
Sound:                             Harish Swaminathan 
Costumes:                        Lakshmi Srinath 
Props:                              Vidyuth Srinivasan 
Sets:                                Michael Muthu 
Production Coordination:   Sunandha Ragunathan, Gopi Nair 
Art Work:                         Aarabi Veeraraghavan  
Backstage:                       Aarabi, Shreya, Amitash, Vinay, Sreekanth 

Duration:                          1 hour 50 minutes 

For Tickets call: 93819 11977 & 98400 80783 
 

Dates: 10, 11, 12 July 2009, 7.15pm 
Venue: Sivakami Pethachi Auditorium, Luz Church Road, Chennai 

THE STORY 
Dismissed as a wastrel by the community, Kalidasa, a young cowherd in a remote village, finds his only support in Mallika, who believes in his genius despite her mother Ambika's hostility towards him. Vilom, who loves Mallika, warns her that Kalidasa loves no one but himself.  
Mallika persuades Kalidasa to accept a royal appointment as Poet Laureate and go to the capital, Ujjaini. Despite Ambika's illness and their increasing poverty, Mallika rejoices in Kalidasa's fame and glory, even when he marries the Gupta princess and becomes king. She is distressed only when Kalidasa revisits the village with his queen, but not Mallika's home. 
Years later, the motherless, destitute Mallika, with a child of her own, sees a drenched, dishevelled Kalidasa stumbling into her home again. Dislocated from his roots, he can be neither a poet nor a politician.  
Can he make a new beginning with Mallika? 
In this contemporary classic, Hindi playwright Mohan Rakesh refashions the story of the archetypal poet to raise disturbing questions: can fame corrupt the soul? Can material success destroy creativity? Can a poet whose work is visionary be blind about life?  

DIRECTOR'S NOTE 
One Day in Ashadha has been produced in languages ranging from Manipuri to Malayalam by some of India's greatest directors. So why did I want to direct this play again?  

a) This production explores the ever-evolving relationship between authors, texts, and audiences. I see Mallika as the eternal rasika without whose sensitive, discerning response, Kalidasa's writing cannot achieve fruition.  
b) I see the antagonist Vilom as the man with a vision: clear, practical, grounded. But who wants to stand on the ground when imagination empowers you to soar into the skies?  
c) Through One Day in Ashadha, I explore the yawning chasm between poetry and reality, beauty and ugliness, a preoccupation that drives my own writing for theatre. In this production, Rakesh's play becomes a frame narrative from which Kalidasa's own writings emanate.  
d) By splicing the play with scenes from Kalidasa's works that counterpoint Rakesh's cynical, starkly modernist retelling of the poet's life, I have sought to hear the dissonances between the ideal and the real, see the dark spot on the full moon.   

As always in my work, I have used music and dance as parallel texts layering the emotions. Gifted young Carnatic vocalists Amritha Murali and Swarnarethas sing the verses of Kalidasa, transformed into dance sequences by Kalakshetra artistes Sheejith Krishna and Anjana Anand. 

Directing One Day in Ashadha allows me to consider anew the contemporary Indian writer's burden, the inescapable, staggering weight of historical, linguistic and literary pasts out of which present writing must emerge. 
 

THE DIRECTOR 
Dr. Gowri Ramnarayan is a feature writer (music, cinema, theatre, literature) with the nationwide English daily "The Hindu". She has: 
- Translated two Marathi plays of Vijay Tendulkar (Kanyadaan, Mitrachi Goshtha, OUP), and the Tamil short stories of Kalki Krishnamurti (Kalki: Selected Stories, Penguin). 
- Authored children's books (Abu's World, Abu's World Again (HarperCollins), Past Forward, OUP). 
- Served as a jury member of Fipresci (the international association of film critics) at international film festivals in Venice, London, Valladolid, Mumbai, Oslo, and Locarno.  
- Vocally accompanied Carnatic musician MS Subbulakshmi (1981-97). 
- Sung for Rukmini Devi Arundale's 1984 Bharatanatyam production Meera. 
- Scripted and directed two theatre productions in Tamil: Katrinile Varum Geetam (1999) and Manadil Urudi Vendum (2000).  
- Scripted and directed five plays in English: Dark Horse (2005), Rural Phantasy (2006), Flame of the Forest (2007), Water Lilies (2007), and Mathemagician (2009).  The plays explore the themes of war, displacement, loneliness and loss in worlds rent apart by racial, religious and political divides.  

THE ACTORS:  
PC Ramakrishna has been with The Madras Players since 1969 as actor and administrator. Among the many significant roles he has played are those in "Dance Like a Man", "Anna Weiss", "Faith Healer", and Mohan Rakesh's other celebrated play "Adhey Adhurey." "Mercy" was his solo theatre performance based on well known Tamil writer Sivasankari's work.    

Anita Ratnam is a dancer, choreographer, cultural entrepreneur and an intersectionist engaged in contemporary conversations about dance, performance and feminism, currently exploring ritual gesture and the sacred feminine in dance. Her doctoral dissertation explores the challenges of reviving the 13th century temple ritual Kaisiki Natakam.  

V Balakrishnan is a Chennai-based theatre worker and National School of Drama alumnus who has directed and acted in over 60 plays. Awarded the Charles Wallace Scholarship in 2002, he heads Theatre Nisha, and works regularly with JustUs Repertory and Dia. His solo performances include Barabbas, Patol Babu, Film Star and Mathemagician. 

Vasudev Menon is a research assistant at the British Heart Foundation, and actor/director with the Edinburgh-based Holy Cow Performing Arts Group. An alumnus of the Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal Scottish Academy, he sings and plays rock and blues guitar. 

Akhila Ramnarayan teaches postcolonial and women's studies at the University of Dayton in the US. Her current research on Indian women icons is focused on the film Meera (1944).  Her love for theatre stems from undergraduate days in Women's Christian College and recent work with JustUs Repertory and Dia. 

Sunandha Ragunathan is a full-time theatre actor performing lead roles and coordinating backstage work in JustUs repertory and Dia productions.     

Aarabi Veeraraghavan is an artist and dancer trained by the Narasimhacharis, now discovering a love for the theatre.  

Amitash Pradhan, a second year student majoring in electronic media, and studying Hindustani classical music, has worked with several Chennai theatre groups, and conducted children's workshops for the British Council, Chennai.  

Shreya Yadav is currently pursuing her BSc in zoology at Stella Maris College, Chennai. Apart from theater, her interests include distance running, diving and mountaineering.  

THE SINGERS: 
Amritha Murali is a gifted young Carnatic vocalist trained in the traditional school, who is equally accomplished in playing the violin. 

Swarnarethas is a developing software engineer, and talented Carnatic vocalist trained by frontline musician Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 

THE DANCERS:  
Sheejith Krishna is a charismatic young dancer trained in Kalakshetra where he teaches and choreographs stylistically distinct new work. His ‘Masquerade,' based on Alexandre Dumas' Man in the Iron Mask, broke new ground.  

Anjana Anand is an alumnus of Kalakshetra now making her mark as a dance performer and stage actor,     

THE TRANSLATOR: 
The English version of Mohan Rakesh's play used in this production is translated by cricketer turned cultural critic V Ramnarayan, editor-in-chief of music and dance magazine Sruti, and translator of such works as Tamil novelist Ashokamitran's Star-Crossed. 

THE MADRAS PLAYERS 
The oldest English amateur theatre company in India, The Madras Players has over the span of  54 unbroken years, presented more than 250 theatrical productions, among them  some of the greatest works of playwrights from India and abroad.  

Over the years, the company was responsible for throwing up and developing some of the best acting talent in the country among them Vimal Bhagat, PC Ramakrishna, Visalam Ekambaram and Bhagirathi Narayanan.  

In the last couple of decades, the focus of The Madras Players has been on Indian writing, both in original work and translation. The group prides itself in the fact that in 2009, all the plays being produced are authored, translated or adapted by Chennai based playwrights and writers.   

DIA  
Dia was launched by V Ramnarayan and Gowri Ramnarayan to craft original theatre work combining music, dance and poetry. It is a unit of Wordcraft, which is also involved in publishing. Its maiden venture has been ‘MS & Radha,' an intimate biography authored by Gowri Ramnarayan.  

‘The World of Titans' narrativised the journey of Carnatic maestro Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer with his disciple TM Krishna on the vocals; ‘Swatantra Daham' explored the thirst of freedom – from the political to the spiritual - in the works of Carnatic composers, rendered by Sangeetha Sivakumar; ‘Speaking of Siva' (2009) combined dance (Priyadarsini Govind, Anjana Anand), music (Savita Narasimhan), paintings (Lakshmi Srinath) and narrative (Gowri Ramnarayan). ‘Mathemagician' (2009) a monodrama, written/directed by Gowri Ramnarayan, looks at time present through the eyes of Nikor, a eunuch in ancient Babylon. 

Contact: gowri.ramnarayan@gmail.com