“Crossing the River”, a play written by Ambai

About the play:

Ambai’s ‘Crossing the River’ (Hindi/45mins) is revived after ten years by well-known theatre director K.S. Rajendran’s Natyadharmi theatre group.

The play interrogates the idea of a woman, as constructed, shaped and imposed by social and cultural forces. Through the metaphor of Sita, who is banished to the forests by Ram, the play embarks upon a series of uncomfortable questions at patriarchy. Different characters from our cultural and mythological memory resurface blurring who Sita is… Locating a ‘Sita’ in all individuals who refuse to confirm. A transformative text coming back to life after a decade!

About the writer of the play:

Ambai (CS Lakshmi) a creative writer in Tamil and a historian. She has been an independent researcher in Women’s Studies for the last thirty-five years. Her stories have been translated in two volumes entitled A Purple Sea and In a Forest, A Deer. The latter shared the Hutch-Crossword award for translated fiction. Her most recent work is a detective fiction As the Day Darkens. She received the Pudumaipiththan memorial lifetime achievement award in 2005, the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award of Tamil Literary Garden, University of Toronto, Canada, for the year 2008, and the Kalaignyar Mu. KarunanidhiPorkizi award for fiction in 2011. The University of Madras awarded her for excellence in literature in the centenary celebrations of the International Women’s Day in March 2011. She is currently the Director of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women). She commissioned two translated volumes in Tamil of 12 booklets on women from various walks of life, published by SPARROW. She is also the series Editor of five volumes of translations of 87 writers from 23 languages of India. She lives in Mumbai with her filmmaker friend Vishnu Mathur, her seventeen year old foster daughter Khintu and her two little brothers Krishna and Sonu.

About the director of the play:

Prof. K.S. Rajendran teaches at the National School of Drama. He is a well-known director of plays in various Indian languages. An alumnus of the National School of Drama, where he teaches Dramatic Literature, he has worked extensively with the Chennai-based theatre repertory Koothu-p-Pattarai. In 2007 he founded the New Delhi Theatre Workshop, which has presented well received productions such as Madhavi, Daar se bichhudi, UrvaShe, and Chimtewale Baba.

His directorial work ranges from adaptations of Shakespeare, Brecht, Ionesco and Genet to contemporary playwrights and authors such as Omchery, Shankara Pillai, Shiva Prakash, Tendulkar, Alekar, Kambar, Indira Parthasarathy and Lalit Mohan Thapalyal, besides Sanskrit classics by Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti and Shudraka. His production of Shakespeare’s RICHARD III was presented at the Second International Theatre Festival organised by GATS at Beijing in September, 2011.