Act 10, Scene five

As the lights dimmed in Mumbai’s art deco Liberty theatre last week, two women took the stage. Mona Ambegaonkar and Gazal Dhaliwal were set for another performance of TheVagina Monologues, this time at Kashish, South Asia’s biggest queer film festival — a special performance for a special occasion. Kaizaad Kotwal, the co-director, sat down on a chair alongside them.

“It’s important to note than this play has survived for more than 15 years in India,” he told the audience. “That says a lot about the piece, and also about where India is heading.” When the women completed their parts, the room reverberated with relentless applause. Kotwal does not mention the exact number of times the play has been performed, and instead prefers to say “hundreds” of shows. TheVagina Monologues has had a decade-plus run in Mumbai and elsewhere. “I often say half-jokingly that I would love the play to go out of business,” he said. “That would mean that violence (against women) has gone away.” Continued gender-based violence has been one of the less happy reasons for the play’s enduring run, he believes. “It just won’t go away,” he said. “And it seems to get worse.”

TheVagina Monologues, a global smash hit written by Eve Ensler and first performed in New York in 1996, touches on issues of abuse, consent and identity. The piece was written after years of interviews with women.

The Indian version of the play was first performed in March 2003 in Mumbai, and has since travelled across the country. A more positive reason for its longevity, Kotwal believes, is that more people are interested and keen to learn and listen to what women have to say.

It’s hard to pin down the perfect combination of factors that makes a play a classic. TheVagina Monologues is one, and Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like A Man , which will soon clock 1,000 shows, has also certainly been sprinkled with some of that ineffable fairy dust. “There are so many aspects,” says Dattani, the playwright. “The universality of the script, the production values, the performances, the reach the producer has. All these factors magically came together in Dance Like A Man .”

The family drama set against the backdrop of dance opened in Bengaluru with eight shows in 1989. The play’s unusually long run has taken Dattani by surprise. “I thought it would run for about five shows and that would be it,” he laughs. Lillete Dubey, actor and director, took over the production in the ’90s and it’s been performed pretty much every year since then.

For an English play to approach the 1,000-mark is considered a remarkable achievement, and both TheVagina Monologues and Dance Like A Man have become canonical theatre fare in Mumbai. Both can be broadly called serious works, whereas long-running plays in the city’s Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati scene, by contrast, tend to be comedies.

It is hard to compare across theatrical traditions — but longevity can be measured by the number of shows as well as the number of years the play has managed to run. TheVagina Monologues and Dance Like A Man have had fewer shows, but have run for more years. Marathi and Gujarati plays, in contrast, tend to rack up more shows over a shorter period before the lights fade out.

However, Vastraharan, the magnum opus of the Marathi stage, does well on both counts. The play has been staged over 5,000 times since its debut in 1980. It employs the play-within-a-play technique, and has a Malwani cast enacting the Draupadi disrobing scene from the Mahabharata. The play with mythological characters and familiar references, in retrospect, seems to have been primed for success.

“There is an innocence in the play’s comedy,” says Prasad Kambli , whose Bhadrakali Productions has been producing Vastraharan . “It’s a stress-buster.”

Kambli’s father, Machindra, played the lead in Vastraharan for more than two decades. His name is synonymous with it, after having acted in 4,926 of the 5,211 performances. Vastraharan will open again in July and play at venues across Mumbai. Wada Chirebandi and Sahi Re Sahi are the other Marathi blockbusters that have run for years, and completed hundreds of shows.

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Hindi theatre, too, has had a fair run on the Mumbai stage. In 1979, Ank Theatre first performed Hai Mera Dil, a comedy of errors featuring a hypochondriac who believes he is dying and must get his wife married to another man before leaving this world. When the play first opened at Prithvi Theatre, the new venue didn’t even have a ‘Houseful’ board to put up. After a few shows though, they had to arrange for one.

The play will open for its 1,030th show in July. Though most performances have been in Mumbai, the play has also travelled a fair bit. “It’s a peep into someone else’s drawing room,” says Preeta Mathur, who is part of the cast and also runs Ank. “It’s very identifiable. And it is like therapy for the audience, a play which tells you that life should not be taken too seriously.”

She has been performing the female lead in Hai Mera Dil since 1993. For the actors, the play is a recurring pleasure. “It is a huge comfort zone for all of us,” she says.

Likewise, Ramesh Talwar played the role of a 20-year-old man over two decades in Shatranj Ke Mohre , produced by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA).

Not just that, he has also been directing the PL Deshpande-scripted satire since 1971 and has played each of the other seven male leads over the years. It was most recently performed in May. “IPTA does socially-conscious plays that bring issues to light,” he says. “We don’t just want to make people laugh or cry.”

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Over time such plays attain cult status, attracting audiences simply on account of longevity. It becomes a rite of passage and evolves to be a crucial city experience that ought not to be missed. “ Vastraharan has become a brand,” says Kambli. “It’s a phenomenon. Even now when we open the play, tickets sell in the black market.”

Further, plays such as these have a core viewership that returns for repeat performances year after year. “People have come back five or six times to watch our play,” says Trupti Thakkar, executive producer of The Waiting Rooms, a Gujarati play that has been running for two years and has completed 350-plus shows. “Sometimes they feel instead of trying something new, why not just watch this again?”

A few return to see how the play they watched years ago has evolved, particularly with a new cast. “Nostalgia is a big factor for their success,” says Deepak Karanjikar, chief secretary, Akhil Bharatiya Natya Parishad, the nodal body for Marathi theatre.

In the case of Mareez , a Gujarati play that has been performed since 2004, the presence of a familiar literary figure in the play has helped. “Sometimes when we say our lines on stage, the audience says it with us,” says Dharmendra Gohil, who has been a part of Mareez since the beginning.

However, Mareez, with over 500 performances spread over 13 years, is something of an outlier in the Gujarati theatre scene.

In Mumbai’s Gujarati theatre space, plays are usually performed for a few months or a year at a stretch, accruing hundreds of performances in these spells, and then retired.

Sanjay Goradia, a veteran Gujarati producer, explains the economic calculus at work. A “superhit” is a play that crosses 200 shows. “Hundred or 125 shows are peanuts for us,” he says.

Sometimes, when big stars such as Paresh Rawal (Gujarati), Nana Patekar (Marathi) or Aanjjan Srivastav (Hindi) become part of the cast, it boosts a play’s cachet and chances of longevity. “Once a play becomes a brand there is always an audience for it,” says Goradia. “If you revive it, it will definitely run.”

And classics are rarely tinkered with. Practitioners tend to stick to the original script, although they might tighten or update it with contemporary or topical references. “We don’t change it much,” says Talwar. Shatranj, originally a three-act play, has now been condensed to two. “The only difference is that instead of 200 laughs you might have four fewer laughs,” he adds .

However, long-running plays have to tackle a risk of another sort — of cast members getting into autopilot mode with repeat performances. “We have to be aware of that,” says Gohil. “I try and think of every show as my first show.” The trick is to bring something fresh to each performance. Successful plays have managed to do that. “They keep discovering something new,” says Dattani about the cast of Dance Like A Man. “I just saw it a few months ago and was as moved then as when I saw it 10 years ago.”

Marathi and Gujarati plays that have left an imprint on the cultural landscape, also tend to draw in audiences unfamiliar with the language. They usually come to see what the fuss is about.

“We are finding a non-Gujarati audience also,” says Thakkar of The Waiting Rooms . “That’s because the play deals with characters people can relate to.”

But when some plays enjoy an extended run, it might inadvertently end up hampering the chances of new productions. “Nostalgia can be both a strength and a weakness,” says Karanjikar. “It might restrict audiences for newer plays.”

Bhavya Doreis a Mumbai-based journalist

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