Director Chetan Datar, the self-titled ‘brat of Marathi theatre’, tells  Subuhi Jiwani how he reworked Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Wada trilogy
 
Chetan Datar sometimes wonders why he does “uppity” plays like his latest, Wada, in which he edits celebrated playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Wada trilogy, into a single play. He wonders why he isn’t “mad”, like playwright-director Makrand Deshpande, who “does theatre that is playing in his head.” And what’s playing in Datar’s head? Right now it’s mostly theatre of the anguished kind. 
 
Elkunchwar wrote the first part of his trilogy, Wada Chirebandi, in the early 80s, which was directed by Vijaya Mehta in 1985. A decade later, he wrote part two and three, Magna Talyakathi and Yuganta. He had insisted that the three plays be staged together, and in 1994, Chandrakant Kulkarni took up the challenge of directing the trilogy  —–an eight hour-long marathon of plays, complete with realistic scenography.
 
The Wada trilogy traces the decline of feudalism and the loss of tradition in the life of the Deshpandes, a land-owning Brahmin family in Dharangaon, over three generations. Wada Chirebandi opens with the death of the tatya,  the head of family, which consists of brothers Bhaskar and the Mumbai-settled Sudhir, their wives and offspring, their unwed siblings, Prabha and Chandu, and their mother. Magna Talyakathi explores the lives of the second generation: Bhaskar’s son Parag, a transporter of contraband goods, and daughter Ranju, who is obsessed with cinema, and Sudhir’s son Abhay, who goes to the US to study medicine.
 
Yuganta sees Abhay return to Dharangaon, divorced and distraught. Parag, whose father had tilled the family land all his life, opts for a crop that will eventually strip the land of its richness. Yuganta ends on a poignant note: Parag comforts the childless Abhay, who is distressed that he cannot bequeath anything, with the admission that all he can give his own son is barren land. 
 
Datar didn’t hear resonances of his own life in the trilogy, which is set in Vidarbha district—his native place is in the Konkan and his family home did not resemble the Deshpandes’ wada or mansion. Rather, it was the multi-layered relationships between Elkunchwar’s characters that appealed to Datar.
 
Datar’s minimalist production, with only a few pillars and a couple of stools, is strikingly different from earlier versions. “The plays were naturalistic. But there’s no point in doing it in naturalistic style for the third time. The audience becomes confused and loses out on the main point,” he insists. The crux of the play, according to Datar, lies in the stories of its “outsiders”: Prabha who was not allowed to go to medical college; Chandu who eventually leaves home and becomes a vagrant; Parag and Abhay.
 
Datar first did Wada two years ago with the students of Lalit Kala Kendra, Pune University’s dramatic arts department. This production has professional actors, but since they weren’t able to devote enough time to rehearsals, he feels the play is not “harmonious.” But he signs off, disenchanted with the city: “Good theatre will only come from students or small places, where people have time to rehearse.”