Dream Run

Located in mundane,middle-class environs in Pune,the play revolves around Barve (Chandrakant Kale)—a female impersonator with an unfulfilled wish to perform her dream role. Barve worships Balgandharva,a yesteryear icon of a fading tradition of sangeet-natak. She lives under the staircase of a building with a drunk,short-tempered and at times menacing Shyamrao (Mohan Agashe). Living

above them are two clerks — Bavdekar (Satish Alekar) and Javdekar (Ramesh Madhekar),who lead their secure,middle-class lives,and fantasise about marriage. In one such fantasy,a delusional Javdekar mistakes Barve for a woman and proposes marriage to her. Thus manifests a situation where Barve will finally deliver her dream performance—combining popular songs from a bygone era of sangeet-natak.

When the play premiered in 1979,audiences expected a nostalgic tribute to a dying art. What they saw instead confused them. The romanticism of the songs juxtaposed with the grim,mercurial interplay created an irony that was

beyond the grasp of viewers. “The play,when it was first staged,didn’t receive a good response. We had about 20-25 shows. But then this play was never popular,” says Alekar,who has braved popular audience rejection before.

Alekar,along with Jabber Patel,Agashe,Mohan Gokhale,Kale and many others formed the Theatre Academy in Pune in 1974 as a breakaway from Progressive Dramatic Association (PDA) —the leading experimental theatre group of the time—in protest of objections raised against Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal,on the grounds of being ‘anti-Brahmin’. “Alekar is a difficult playwright. His plays use prosaic and minimalist sets. The almost anti-theatre form he

employs put off most theatre-going audiences. Begum Barveexposed the sickening feudalism and oppressive structure within the sangeet-natak tradition and the provincial,middle-class life which audiences weren’t prepared for,” explains playwright Ramu Ramanathan,who holds Alekar’s Begum Barve and Mahanirvanin high regard.

What is surprising though is that the play—which has been revived every now and then,and now comes to Mumbai after eight years—has suddenly gained acceptance among larger audiences. “When the play was revived in September last year on request by Rangashankara,Bangalore,it received a packed audience for the three days it was staged. This could be partly because of the aura that has formed around the play over the years,and maybe the younger audiences don’t look for the same kind of unity in narrative. The seamless transitions between dreams and reality,was unprecedented in Marathi theatre,” remarks Shanta Gokhale,theatre critic and translator of the play to English. “It was the toughest play I’ve ever translated simply because of its strong cultural rootedness,” she confesses.