What was it about Chekhov’s The Three Sisters that inspired you?

Adapting Three Sisters to pre-Partition India was an idea brought to me by Jose Rivera. The place of women in both Russian and Indian societies in the late Nineteenth/early Twentieth Centuries is immensely interesting and fertile ground for drama. I think the place of women and how that changes for better or worse is an indicator of what's happening on a larger political/social stage in any society. I'd done plays of Jose's as an actor and when I began to write I turned to him for guidance and inspiration. I started to do the nerdy thing I love best – research. I re-read Three Sisters, then I did some reading about the Russia that Chekhov writes about so often. That pre-Revolutionary time, fraught for him, I think, with both upheaval and a kind of loss - what does modernity usher in and what does it stamp out; that time of redefining relationships between people of different classes, between men and women; that time of questioning authority, seeking equality and liberation from lives oppressed by work to enrich another.

Educated Indians in pre-Independence India were also confronting all of these things and British authority and even presence in India. I began reading the work of Rabindranath Tagore, a leading Indian (Bengali) poet and writer and thinker, world famous in his time. I didn't realize there was a partition before the one we are all familiar with in 1947, when India finally won her Independence. The first partition, fifty years earlier, is the period that Sankalpan deals with. There were so many resonances for me between the educated and upper classes of pre-Revolutionary Russia and pre-(first) Partition India – peasants questioning the supremacy of the landowners, a nationalistic zeal among the poor, the use of education in the masses to create a desire to re-order social hierarchies. And of course there is a long history of friendship between Russia and later the Soviet Union and India (America and Pakistan were allies). I learned about the prevalence of purdah in Hindu households, which of course is very similar to Victorian ideals of the separation between the sexes. I am not sure if there is a Russian equivalent there.

Anyway, I began writing and the play took about three years to finish and I had a lot of help dramaturgically from the amazing and lovely Stephen Wadsworth. It is ultimately not an adaptation, as you know, but a fusion of two stories – Three Sisters and Tagore's The Home and the World – which by the way was made into a wonderful film by Satiyajit Ray.

Do you see any similarities between pre-revolution Russia and 1905 India and America today?

I do see similarities.  If purdah then was a form of social control over women by men to "protect" them, then today we still have a form of purdah, though it's far more subtle and often couched in intellectual, even progressive, ideology (and in conservative ideology, too). But generally, I think ambition is seen differently in women than in men. I still think women are the ones, typically, to take responsibility for raising children in a home where previously the woman worked. I think certain fields are not friendly towards women, science being one, for example. We have of course come a long way from being sequestered behind a curtain or tucked away in women's quarters but in almost any field men are still paid more than women and hold positions of greater authority than women. Full participation of women in politics is a global issue. There is still gender and race inequality. Back then people were dealing with modernization; today perhaps we are dealing with globalization. At Yale right now the theme for our Bake Off plays is “the fallen woman”. I don’t think that was capricious on Paula Vogel’s part. It’s timely. The woman question continually comes to the surface and challenges us to examine our society and our advances more closely.

And, of course, we are living in a time of great change, where things we have put into motion are coming back to haunt us. It is not a direct parallel and there are many, many nuances, but when the Queen signed the East India Company into existence in 1600, it changed the course of a subcontinent. Our supporting of certain unsavory characters (dictators) in various parts of the world (against the threat of Communism) has fundamentally changed what the world, and America, looks like. It's huge topic, but the common strain is a fledgling power overreaching and setting in chain a motion of events that lead to fundamental shifts in power.

At the end of The Three Sisters, the sisters talk about going to Moscow, but ultimately remain were they are. In Sankalpan, the sisters talk about Calcutta, and, with varying opinions, about the revolutionary movement. At the end of the play, the youngest sister, Nandini leaves. What inspired you to take a different approach to the decision to stay?

I don't know why I have Nandini leave at the end – and in my mind, she doesn't get very far. Not that she returns, but I always suspect something terrible happens to her. But I did want this kind of bursting forth, an attempt by one person for real change, to do something, for better or worse in an attempt to break free of the world she was outgrowing. It's like this feeling I have today of wanting to run into the streets and shout, "What are we doing?!" But I am not as brave as Nandini.

Since the character of Devyani (the love interest of the brother and counterpart to Natasha in Chekhov’s Three Sisters) is from a poor background and at least knows what she wants, even though she's ferocious in many ways, I wonder if you mean for us to sympathize with her?

I grew to understand Devyani as I got to know her and I hope an audience does, as well. It was important to me that (like Natasha in Chekhov) she have agency, that Poor equals neither Helpless nor Noble. But in knowing herself fully as she does and understanding her world in an unapologetic way she does have a dignity and more importantly, power.

I bring it up because in The Three Sisters, Natasha always seems to me to be opportunistic and vengeful – but I began to very much like Devyani – though, like everyone else in the play, she's incredibly complex. She also states the play's title when she says "Our glorious country. We celebrate the artist. Our Scripture. The Cause. But we spit on our own people. Why? Because our desires make our heads weak." Which, going back to my second question, kind of could be said about America now.

Yes I totally agree! And that's a beautiful observation – Devyani as a sort of personification of America and our own complexities as Americans and a nation. We want to do the right thing. We want to be leaders in the world. But we are so full of flaws and weaknesses. When I am moved by the Star Spangled Banner (yes, I am always moved to tears by it, when it's sung well) I think it is because I see our potential as a people/nation and I witness our failure to achieve that potential. But we come awfully close sometimes. So there's the hope that never quite fades.

How has being an actor informed your writing? When did you make the decision to write and why plays, specifically?

There is a kind of mystery to writing that still exists for me and that I want to nurture and not lose. I am at Yale right now participating in Paula Vogel's bootcamp and she spoke today about defamiliarization, or the alienation effect, or making the familiar strange. When you first begin writing it's all inspiration and eventually you need those tools to sustain a long career – the tools I am learning as I go and at bootcamp in a very concentrated fashion – but there is always the need to go back, at least in a first draft as Doug Wright said today, to that initial impulse of why you are writing. In subsequent drafts you can bring in your knowledge of plot form, etc. to bear upon the work and shape it. Does that make any sense?

I guess what I am saying is, that as an actor I've had this long-time passion verging on awe for plays and playwrights and that as I have grown, as an actor and a human, I hope, I got angry and that passion found an outlet in writing. But anger or passion or inspiration alone can only take you so far. So as an actor I think I have a solid foundation in theater (which is why I write plays) and an ear for dialogue and some knowledge of theatricality. As a writer I have such a long, long way to go to truly understand the craft of writing – even if I am only understanding it to throw it away. But that need for defamiliarization, I think if you are an actor first, then a writer, you already have that because you don't know all the tricks yet and you come at it fresh. Actors have to do this in their craft all the time, right? Un-learn habits, not fall back on old tricks. I am finding out that writers have to do that too. But first you have to learn the tricks!