A Thousand Splendid Suns (Play Script)

Book excerpt: The script for the stage production of the bestselling Khaled Hosseini novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, as adapted by playwright Ursula Rani Sarma. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss, and by fate. As they endure the ever-escalating dangers around them--in their home, as well as in the streets of Kabul--they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, playwright Ursula Rani Sarma reimagines Hosseini's novel to show how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, this reimagination of A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling production about unlikely friendship and indestructible love. This adaptation was first performed by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in February 2017.