Strir Patra - Created and acted by Gargi Mukherjee

And

Last Flames - Created and directed by Sudipta Bhawmik

Please note that although CCIM is listed as the venue but the played will be actually staged at

Actors Thetre Workshop,
145 West 28th Street, 3rd Floor,
New York, NY 10001

Streer Patra or The Letter of a Wife

Duration : one hours
Format : Monologue
Director-Actresses : Gargi Mukherjee
Language : English

This will be an hour-long monologue performed by a female actor in a minimalist stage set up. This monologue will showcase Rabindra Nath Thakur's (Tagore) very important work that espouses the cause of feminism, depicting the significance of the protest made by an ordinary middle-class Bengali wife in an era, when such instances were rare and unheard of.

The play will be in English and the performance will be relevant and meaningful to a Western audience as well as South Asian. The idea is to evoke within the minds of the audience that chord of a universal human emotion--of protest--and how one finds a way to express her inner feelings even under suppression, confined in a helpless situation. The manifesto of protest can be so powerful even when articulated through the form of a simple letter.

The Last Flames

A play in English by Sudipta Bhawmik
Duration: 60 mins (approx)

Basanta Koomar Roy, a journalist, arrived in USA somewhere around 1910 to study at the University of Wisconsin. He was the first person to write about Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 in the Open Court magazine and introduced Tagore to the Americans and the West, few months before Tagore won the Nobel Prize. In 1915, he wrote the first ever English biography of Tagore - “Rabindranath Tagore : The Man and his Poetry”. Later he wrote several articles on Tagore,
translated several of his poems, essays and short stories. He claimed to be a friend and disciple of Rabindranath Tagore. However, Basanta Koomar Roy fell from grace of his Gurudev and his followers, and his name is hardly ever mentioned in any scholarly treatise on Rabindranath Tagore.

This play, tries to capture Rabindranath Tagore through the eyes of Basanta Koomar Roy, an expatriate Bengali like many of us. The play takes place during the fall of 1947, just after India’s independence, in the apartment of Basanta Koomar in New York City. Samar, a young journalist, comes to interview Basanta Koomar and tries to unravel the mystery of why Basanta Koomar’s contribution was never acknowledged. In the process he comes to discover
Rabindranath in a new perspective that was hitherto unknown to him while Basanta Koomar gets an opportunity to redeem himself.