2011 Home

Our Mission

Our Sponsors

2009's Sandwich Reads
Together Program
Celebrated Diversity

Books That
Touched My
Life

Contact Us

Carol McManus read A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

As a student at NYSU’s College at Old Westbury, Carol McManus chose to focus her undergraduate thesis on
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. A Passage to India examines the relationships between the Hindu Professor Godbole, the Muslim Dr. Aziz, and the visiting English Christians Mrs. Moore, Adela Quested, and Cyril Fielding, all characters drawn from India’s three main cultures. Set during the English colonial period, A Passage to India attempts to answer the question: Can an Englishman and an Indian be friends? At the time, many thought this was impossible.

Sandwich has always been McManus’s hometown. In fact, McManus was editor of the Sandwich Broadsider during the 1970’s. However, she grew up in eighteen different countries in South America and the West Indies, and, no matter where she lived, she always observed that the circumstances to which we’re born are simply a matter of luck. “We draw lines between us based on superficial things,” McManus observed. “It’s the little things that keep us apart.”

McManus shares Forster’s belief that if people would simply make the effort to connect with each other, the world would be a better place. “My take on Passage definitely goes beyond Indian vs. English,” she explained. “I believe Forster used India's cultural and religious alienations as an example, a means to show how difficult, how almost but not altogether impossible it is for the human race to communicate effectively outside those and other (nationalistic, for example) boundaries.”

Last fall, McManus played Tituba in the Crucible, and then the Latina nurse in Sunshine Boys. “I love to portray diverse characters on the stage,” says McManus. “I’ve also played a German grandmother in Lost in Yonkers, an Irish busybody in By the Bog of Cats, a Portuguese prostitute in Mulheres Da Noite, and every once in a while an American, but usually a Southerner or Texan. It’s just more fun!

“When creating a character, I try to make her (and, on a few occasions, him) as understandable as possible.” If the audience doesn’t care about what happens to a character, she indicated, then the actor has failed. “This does, in a way,” she said, “bring us back to Forster’s belief that to only connect will go a long way in fostering (no pun!) understanding, and therefore, tolerance, in a diversified world… You really knew where it was at, Mr. Forster!”

Journalist, director, performer, and Angel House social worker
Carol McManus read
A Passage to India by
E. M. Forster.