CONTACT PLAYWRIGHT

Synopsis

Early in the History of Ideas programme the plays went beyond a biographic focus to institutional processes that shaped important historical developments. Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer award book The Emperor of All Maladies appeared a most eminent inclusion in the programme. It was good historical material, tracing the several lines of struggle to come to grips with cancer. Mukherjee himself called the book a “biography of cancer”. A team of three from BLT and a counterpart team from St. John’s Research Institute took on the research task of compiling relevant material for the storytelling needed for a play. Mukherjee himself was gracious in giving the team ready permission for adapting the book into a stage play. The play attempts to describe the experience, often extremely frustrating, of several schools of medical researchers in their quest for a handle on the dreaded disease. The characters include the leaders in the early years and some landmark cases that provided breakthroughs, all drawn from Mukherjee’s book. In addition, the play script has a group of laboratory mice narrating the process of a hundred years as they have seen it. The play opened at an international conference on Bio-ethics at St. John’s Academy of Medical Sciences in Bangalore. The play has been published by Vitasta Publishers as part of an anthology titled 'The History of Ideas', which is available on Amazon and Flipkart.

Duration

100   Minutes

No of characters

8