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Tumhari Amrita Play Script Pdf

'Tumhari Amrita is a timeless play. It ran for 24 years and you can still interpret and reinterpret it as many times as you want. I have seen Farooq Shaikh, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri being part of. The concept of “Love Letters” was very interesting. I was the head of the Prithvi Theatre and this play is a tribute to late Jennifer Kapoor (Actress, wife of the charming Indian actor Shashi Kapoor). ”In a performance like 'Tumhari Amrita', “the audience becomes pivotal to the play”, added Feroz Khan, the much acclaimed director.

TumhariAmrita played in our city for a few shows. By Ms Shabana Azmi and Mr FarookhSheikh. I missed it. As I have missed Putul Khela and Kallol andeven Raktakarabi. I was searching the net one day for whatever glimpses ofthese that Mr

Google had to offer. It was thenthat I found, that Tumhari Amrita was an adaptationof LoveLetters, a play by Mr A R Gurney.There was a lot of material on Love Letters, some video snippets and showtimings even. Only the shows were not in my part of the world. But the video snippetsreminded me of a line by Ms Azmi inTumhari Amrita I saw on TV. It was a very short glimpse of onescene in some programme on Ms Azmi. ' Us angan ke kone meek bargat ka perh tha', if I remember correctly. Herreminiscent happy voice haunted me to read theEnglish play. If anyone can tell me more about Tumhari Amrita, the book or theplay, I will remain ever grateful.

Now more about Love Letters. I quote about the play from thebook.

' This is a play or rather a sort of play, which needs no theater,no lengthy rehearsal, no special set, no memorization of lines, and nocommitment from its two actors beyond the night of performance. It is designedsimply to be read aloud by an actor and an actress of roughly the same age,sitting side by side at a table, in front of a group of people of any size. The actor might wear adark grey suit, the actress a simple expensive looking dress. In a more formalproduction, the table and chairs might be reasonably elegant English antiques,and the actors area may be isolated against a dark background by bright focused lights. In performance the piece would seem to work best if the actorsdidn't look at each other until the very end, when Melissa might watch Andy ashe reads his final letter. They listen eagerly and attentively to each otheralong the way, however, much as we might listen to an urgent voice on a one-way radio. comingfrom far, far away.'

All through the 55 pages of thedrama and for a considerable time thereafter, I remained transfixed on thelives of Andy and Melissa. I shared their childhood affection, their teenageromance and, their quarrels, their hide and seek uneasiness in adulthood and their love, which Andy couldadmit only after her death.

Andy's last letter is arevelation. He summarizes his entire life in a tragic canvass of theinnumerable moments where he and Melissa came together and went away indifferent directions throughout their lives. I quote from the concluding partof the play where he writes to her mother after Melissa's death and we hearMelissa's soul suffering from the pain of his admissions.

Andy : Dear Mrs Gardener, I thinkthe first letter I ever wrote was to you, accepting an invitation for Melissa'sbirthday party. Now I am writing you again about her death. I wish to say a few things on paper Icouldn't say at her funeral, both when I spoke, and when you and I talkedafterward. As you may know, Melissa and I managed to keep in touch witheach other most of our lives, primarily through letters. Even now, as I writethis letter to you, I feel I'm writing also to her.

Melissa : Ah, you are inyour element now, Andy....

Andy : We had a complicatedrelationship, she and I, all our lives. We went in very different directions.But somehow, over those years, I think we managed to give something to each other. Melissa expressed allthe dangerous and rebellious feelings I never dared admit to.....

Melissa : Now he tells me....

Andy : And I like to think I gaveher some sense of balance ......

Melissa : BALANCE ? Ohhell, I give up. Have it your way, Andy ; balance!

Andy : Most of the things I didin life I did with her partly in mind. And if I said or did an inauthenticthing, I could almost hear her groaning over my shoulder. But now she is gone, I really don't know howI will get along without her.

Melissa : ( Looking at him for the first time) You'll survive,Andy.............

Andy : I have a wonderful wife,fine children, and a place in the world I feel proud of, but the death ofMelissa suddenly leaves a huge gap in my life...

Melissa : Oh now,Andy......

Andy : The thought of never againbeing able to write to her, to connect to her, to get some signal back fromher, fills me with an emptiness which is hard to describe.

Andy : I don't think there aremany men in this world who have had the benefit of such a friendship with sucha woman. But it was more than friendship, too. I know now that I love her. I loved her even fromthe day I met her, when we talked into that second grade, looking like the lostprincess of Oz.

Melissa : Oh, Andy,PLEASE. I can't bear it.

Andy : I don't think I've everloved anyone the way I loved her, and I know I never ill again. She was at theheart of my life, and already I miss her desperately. I just wanted to say this to you andto her. Sincerely, Andy Ladd.

Melissa : Thank you,Andy. '

The format of the play is unique.It takes you through fifty years of their lives, their journey and theirescapades as they grow up and try to live without each other. Their families,though never appearing in person, are ever visible in the background. Melissawrites less. She is more action oriented. But she portrays Andy in the fewlines she pens. And I quote again.

' Senator and Mrs Andrew M.Ladd, III and family send you warm holiday greetings and every good wish forthe New year.

Melissa : Andy Ladd, is that YOU ? Blow dried and custom-tailored andjogging trim at fifty-five. Hiding behind that lovely wife with her heelstogether and her hands foldeddiscreetly over her snatch ? And is that your new DOG, Andy ? I see that youhave graduated to a golden retriever. And are those your sons and heirs ? And -- Help! Is that a grandchildnestled in someone's arms? God, Andy, you look like the Holy Family! ......'

She is also very direct.

'

Andy : .....Jane and the boys join me in wishing each and all ofyou a Happy Holiday Season.

Melissa : Dear Andy. If I ever get another one of those drippyXeroxed Christmas letters from you, I think I will invite myself out to yourducky little house for dinner, and whenyou are all sitting there eating terribly healthy food and discussing terriblyimportant things and generally congratulating yourselves on all your accomplishments, I think I willstand up on my chair, and turn around and moon the whole f...ing family!'

Tumhari Amrita Play Script Pdf Sarah Delappe

Andy loves to write.

'Andy : O.K. Here goes. The reason I'm writing Angie Atkinson is because Ijust don't think I can stop writing Letters, particularly to girls. As I toldyou before, in some ways I feel I ammost alive when I'm holed up in some corner, writing things down. I pick up apen and almost immediately everything seems to take shape around me. I love to write. I love writingmy parents because then I become the ideal son. I love writing essays forEnglish, because then I am for a short while, atrue scholar. I love writing letters to the newspapers, notes to my fiends,Christmas Cards, anything where I have to put down words. I love writing you.This letter which I'm writingwith my own hand, with my own pen, in my own penmanship, comes from me and noone else, and is a present of myself to you......'

I loved reading the play. Ashappens with age, you will find some of their experiences common to yours. Mostof these will make you smile, some may be sad. But you will surely cherish themand revisit them. Please do. Happy reading! And if you can find TumhariAmritafor me to read or listen to, nothing like it!

p.s. I was so overwhelmed by theplay that I made a recording of it in my untrained voice, playing both Andy andMelissa. I have separated the characters by inserting a bell sound, single bellfor Andy and a double for Melissa. I attach two portions. Please bear with them.

“Can anyone tell why the Mona Lisa is the world’s most famous painting? Can one deconstruct a work of art?” asked Lillete Dubey rhetorically. The conversation is about her play Dance Like A Man, which opened in 1995, and 21 years later, shows no signs of shutting down. It has had more than 500 shows in India and abroad, and still fills up the auditorium every time it is performed.

There are very few English and Hindi plays that have achieved such longevity. Marathi and Gujarati plays hit three digits faster, sometimes in a matter of months, because of multiple shows running every day of the week. Big-ticket English theatre is mostly a weekend recreational activity.

Dance Like A Man, written by Mahesh Dattani, is a complex story of ambition and the pursuit of excellence in the world of classical dance. It also encompasses gender discrimination, father-son tug-of-war, and the fraught relation between a dancer couple, when one of them has to sacrifice a promising career to allow the other to grow. Imaginatively designed and structured in a flashback-flash forward narrative, the play has not become outdated simply because the emotions of control, envy, greed, guilt and, of course, love are not bound by time and culture.

Dubey says the play has been appreciated wherever it has been performed in the world because audiences feel so close to the story. Even today, in spite of a progressive veneer, a father would baulk at his son taking up the supposedly effeminate dance career. For women, the problem of sustaining a high-pressure performing arts schedule after marriage and motherhood persists.

“But,” said Dubey, “all the appreciation and acclaim notwithstanding, a play survives because those who are involved with it want to keep performing it.” Joy Sengupta and Lillete Dubey have been acting in Dance Like A Man from the start. Vijay Crishna took over from Ravi Dubey and Suchitra Pillai from Shivani Wazir when Dubey and her group Prime Time moved from Delhi to Mumbai. “All of us want to continue with it, and audiences just don’t seem to tire of it. It’s difficult to say why this play and not another has had a long life, but somehow everything has come together to make this one popular, and I would say the powerful script and its emotional content have a lot to do with it.”

Tumhari Amrita Play Script Pdf Online

The Hindustani one-man revue, Babban Khan’s Adrak Ke Panje, that ran from 1965 to 2001, was in the Guinness Book of Records in 1984 as the play with the highest number of performances. When it closed down it had completed an astounding 10,180 shows. The play about a man with a very large family, living off his wits and trying to dodge his many creditors made a case for family planning. Over the years Babban Khan kept making changes to incorporate contemporary references and attracted audiences in over sixty countries.

In Mumbai, however, the record for the longest-running Hindi play is held by Ank’s Hai Mera Dil, that opened in 1979 and has completed over 1,200 shows. Ranbir Singh’s adaptation of the English play Send Me No Flowers, by Julius Epstein Norman Barasch, was directed by Dinesh Thakur, who also played the lead role of a hypochondriac who believes he is going to die and wants to find a husband for his wife before he departs. The misunderstandings created are a cause of such hilarity that for forty years audiences are flocking to it, some of them more than once. After Thakur’s death in 2012, his wife Preeta Mathur, who plays the bewildered spouse in the play, has kept the production running, with another Ank actor Aman Gupta taking on the role of the whiny protagonist.

“The play has worked, I think, because of its simplicity,” said Mathur. “All of us on stage are so normal that the audience feels it is looking through the window of their neighbour’s drawing room. Also, a serious subject of the fear of death has been dealt with in a humorous manner and that appeals to people. We have had people come up to us after the show and say, they suffered from hypochondria, and after watching the play, they realised how foolish they were and how much their behaviour must have affected their family.”

Besides these, two other productions that have run for about a quarter of a century are based on AR Gurney’s Love Letters, about a man and a woman keeping a friendship going over many tumultuous years, through an exchange of letters. Both Rahul daCunha’s production starring Rajit Kapur and Shernaz Patel and Feroz Khan’s Tumhari Amrita, beautifully adapted by Javed Siddiqi, and starring Shabana Azmi with Farooq Shaikh, opened in 1992. The former has had about 600 shows and the latter more than 400. Love Letters is still running, with the two actors none the worse for the wear, but Tumhari Amrita had to close because Shaikh passed away in 2013. Feroz Khan intends to revive it as soon as he can find actors talented and charismatic enough to match the original brilliant duo.

“I believe the play has a lot of life left in it,” said Khan, who admits that the play’s huge success in India and overseas took him by surprise because it was such a spare production, with the two actors just sitting behind desks reading letters. But those letters encapsulated the country’s history and the enduring love of Amrita and Zulfi that transcended social and temperamental barriers.

“It is a play of words and nobody can remain immune to the emotions those words evoke,” said Khan, who hits upon where the eternal appeal of these all-time favourite plays lies – words.

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