About the Play
Drama. 50-60 minutes. 3 females, 8 any gender. Suitable for middle school and older.
Winner of the 2022 American Alliance for Theatre & Education (AATE) Distinguished Play Award.
Available in an approximately 40-minute competition version here.
The author grants productions pre-approval to make cuts to meet the time limits of Texas UIL and other one-act competitions.
Synopsis
Plagued by a mysterious illness, teenage shut-in Ash longs to see the world. But she refuses to be sad, instead befriending strangers as they parade past her window, helping each one smile despite their war-torn land's darkness and dystopia. When Ash learns that the building being constructed near her home is a new post office, she dreams of a life spent delivering the mail and traveling beyond her small village in this magical and theatrical contemporary adaptation of Tagore's classic play.
"Playwright Melissa Leilani Larson's exquisite translation—a more appropriate term than adaptation—of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's (1861-1941) most famous play flows with elegant, accessible symbolism. And, as the story progresses in the one day it takes place and as daylight begins to dim, the cast finds its best rhythm in performing this marvelous script." - Les Roka, The Utah Review (Salt Lake City, UT).