Directed by: Dr. Mrinal Jyoti Goswami

Date (1^st Performance): 26^th and 27^th June, 2022

Venue (1^st Performance): Udara, H. No. 52, Naojan Path, Uzan Bazar, Guwahati, Assam

Duration of the play: 1 hr 15 minutes (without intermission)

Language of the play: English and Gibberish

Presentation Style: Stylized

Based on: The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother by Gabriel García Márquez.

About the Play

We can’t tell what life wants. Whom, where and how life wants that always remains an unsolved mystery. Life and myth are related; we can’t figure that out either. The current and cross current of the world makes us think anew every moment. Are we slaves of time !?…Life and fantasy; fantasy and life are the same, that’s how Márquez may have sought a new path.

This narrator of Eréndira’s Metamorphosis is versatile, meta-narrator, deliberately changing her motto from time to time. That is what the performance is all about: as observed by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatic Theatre “The action of the artists is designed not so much to transform a reality external to them and communicate by virtue of the aesthetic treatment, but rather to strive for a self-transformation.” (2006, p. 137).

Directors Note

In 2005 when I read Márquez novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother for the first time, certain ideas had been crisscrossing the mind ever since.

In 2017, I met German theater researcher and director Hans-Thies Lehmann at the Shanghai Theatre. I had always carried his book Postdramatic Theater in my mind and there, in Shanghai Theatre, I got the opportunity to discuss his book with him and also about “Post-text Theatre”. This meeting and the book gave me a new line of thought.

From 2017, I started working on Márquez’s novella in theatrical terms. Things started to stir in my mind and the result is Eréndira’s Metamorphosis.