SYNOPSIS
Pritilata Waddedar was twenty-one years old when she died. She had passed her intermediate examinations first among girls and fifth overall. She had earned a scholarship to Bethune College in Calcutta. She had read philosophy, kept a diary, loved music, and tended to a childhood by a village pond in Chittagong where blue lotuses grew. She had also, by the night of September 23, 1932, led an armed raid on the Pahartali European Club, taken a bullet, ordered her comrades to leave her, and swallowed cyanide so she would not be captured.
Blue Lotus Burning finds her in the moments after — not yet discovered, not quite gone — with someone standing over her who wants to know why. He cannot understand why someone with her gifts would choose this. And so she begins at the beginning.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
Someone gave me a book when I was a child. It was about the Chittagong Armoury Raid, and it had pictures — the places, the people, the fighters. Beside each face were the details a book like that records: the name, the date of death, the cause. Hanged. Shot. Died in the encounter at Jalalabad.
I turned those pages for years. And among them was a photograph of a young woman with piercing eyes, and even as a child I understood that what was in them was love — an enormous, unreasonable love for a country that had not yet become one.
I did not know then that I would spend two years of my adult life trying to understand her.
When Dr. Asish Goswami offered me his Bengali material to develop in English and direct, I said yes before I had thought about what saying yes would require. What it required was two years of reading, of research, of asking questions I could not always find answers to, and of returning again and again to the same problem: she had a way out. First among the girls in her intermediate examinations, fifth overall, a scholarship to Bethune College. She read philosophy. She kept a diary. She had every reason to build a life that lasted longer than twenty-one years.
I wanted to know why she chose otherwise. That was the quest, and I will tell you honestly that I have not fully arrived. What I found instead was that the question kept turning around to face me. Somewhere in the second year I understood that I was not only researching Pritilata. I was looking for my own roots — for what it means to come from people who made that choice, and to have inherited a freedom I did nothing to earn.
This play is what I have to show for it. It is not an answer. It is the question, staged: a young woman asked to justify a life, by someone who genuinely cannot understand her.
The book is still with me. So are the eyes.
Arindam Ghosh
PRODUCTION CREDITS
​
Based on Pritilata, a Bengali writing by Dr. Asish Goswami
Written, Directed and Designed by Arindam Ghosh
Music and Sound Design by Mayookh Bhaumik
Performed by Shampa Basu and Arindam Ghosh
Fight Choreograp hy Jonathan Ezra Rubin
Assistant Fight Choreography by Kara Turner
Lighting Design by Matthew Cheney
Assistance with Lights by Nandini Sen
Sound Projection by Banhi Bhattacharya
Set Construction by Aniruddha Biswas
Additional Sets by Abhijit Dasgupta
​
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Shampa Basu
An actor whose recent credits include Enough to Let the Light In, Five Grains of Rice, Wedding Night, A Living Doll, and Beporowa (Desperado). Winner of the Outstanding Actor Award at the 2024 Maryland Theater Festival and a World Monologue Games finalist, she serves on Ebong TheatriX's board and is a member of The Theater Lab–DC.
​
Arindam Ghosh · Writer, Director, Designer
Co-Artistic Director of Ebong TheatriX, which he co-founded in Washington, DC in 2014. As a playwright, director, and actor he has performed at festivals across the US and India, including the Nadikar Theatre Festival at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, and the AACT National Festival. His honors include the Cliff Smith Memorial Award for Excellence in Directing and the Spencer C. Watson Jr. Award for Excellence in Technical Theater. Avinash, his play about a queer immigrant artist, won sixteen awards across MCTFA and ESTA and became the first South Asian production selected for the AACT National Festival.
​
Mayookh Bhaumik · Music and Sound Design
An American-born composer, producer, and classical musician identified as a child prodigy at three by Ali Akbar Khan. He has scored more than forty films, and in 2012 became the first composer in Bengali cinema to win the National Film Award for Best Original Score, for Laptop. He received the Uniquely South Asian Award at SXSW in 2023.
​
Jonathan Ezra Rubin · Fight Choreography
A Certified Teacher with the Society of American Fight Directors and a Certified Intimacy Director with the Intimacy Professionals Education Collective. A four-time nominee for Outstanding Choreography and an associate member of SDC, the national directors and choreographers union.
​
Matthew Cheney · Lighting Design
Has designed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater, the Writer's Center, and others in the DMV. A WATCH Award nominee for his lighting design on Mary Stuart.
​
WORLD PREMIERE — AUDIENCE RESPONSES
FestivET 2026 · The Writer's Center, Bethesda · September 12 & 13, 2026
"No retakes on the live stage — yet they held the audience breathless for ninety minutes."
"Kept the audience on the edge of their seat for an hour and a half straight."
"The physical demands — pulling, crouching, fighting — all utterly convincing."
"On stage, a shape-shifting wonder. Shampa Basu, in a word, extraordinary."
"I saw Pritilata grow up — a fighter, yet with vulnerabilities."
COMING IN 2027
Blue Lotus Burning is in development for a standalone theatrical run in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Details will be announced in early 2027.
