Mahesh Elkunchwar is not just an acclaimed playwright and screenwriter but is also a witty orator. So when he rose to speak a few words on the first day of the five-day (January 6 to 10, 2009) festival of his plays, organized by the Awishkar theatre group, one expected witticisms. And they came in abundance. "See I am 69, but I am in good health. So I am going to live and write for at least 15 years. So I see no need for a festival dedicated to my plays. I am not a writer, dead and buried or even nearing retirement. But since Awishkaar insisted, I was game. Naturally, I feel nice today to see so many good friends in the audience who think so highly of my work."

Elkunchwar recalled the heavy losses incurred by Awishkar theatre group in 1994 following the ambitious production of his eight-hour-long Wada trilogy. "I told Arun Kakde not to get into this festival. They have already burnt their hands after staging my trilogy. It took them so many years to recover from that setback. But hats off to them. True to Awishkar veteran, the late Arvind Deshpande's belief in constant experimentation, the group has continued with its momentum till date. And that brings Nagpur-based people like me here at the Yashwant Natya Mandir to witness a festival of plays."

While expressing his appreciation of Awishkar's efforts, Elkunchwar said he never thought that he deserved this kind of an honor. "In Nagpur, and specially in my family, people don't know that such a grand fest has been organized for me. You see, I come from a very underexposed and uninitiated background. The big names of Marathi theatre world do not make any impact in my part of the world. They have been consistently unimpressed by most of what I have done. And I have gotten used to it. In fact that is why I never had the luxury of maintaining an ego as a playwright. There was none to massage that ego," observed Elkunchwar to a packed auditorium.

Friends and admirers had a wonderful time listening to the playwright as well as other veterans like director Vijaya Mehta and actor Nana Patekar who had assembled to honor Elkunchwar. Apart from his witty takes, Elkunchwar also gave some food for thought to young theatre people. "I have always asked younger directors to mount my scripts only if they can relate to them. Don't do anything for festivals and anniversaries. Don't handle scripts just because you fear that a playwright might be forgotten. That is no way treat a playwright. You should choose to direct a play only if you feel an inner need to perform something that the playwright has written in another timeframe. I don't fear getting outdated. I have accepted it as a reality. But what I dislike is when people stage your scripts only as a matter of formality."

While listening to Elkunchwar was exhilarating, the performance of ATMAKATHA (the first play in the festival bouquet) that followed was thoroughly disappointing. Director Girish Patke, who has raised hopes about his production, seemed pretty ineffective in his presentation of the play - a script that has been sensitively handled earlier by Pratima Kulkarni. The performance was more memorable due to Dr. Sreeram Lagoo in the lead role. Similarly, Soumitra Chatterjee also infused life in the Bengali version of Elkunchwar's protagonist.

Director Patke, while addressing the media about the upcoming festival, had said that his ATMAKATHA should not be compared with earlier productions, but perceived as a stand alone creation. He is right. The productions are not comparable. Patke has not really appreciated the vast psychological expanse covered in the play - the story of a popular septuagenarian writer (played by Mangesh Bhide) who dictates his autobiography to a young student-cum-admirer (Nilima Deshpande). As the writer and his student sit down to record the life story, the process poses many challenges. First, the student realizes how untruthful and dishonest has the writer been in his literary works. By creating baseless fictional characters that resemble his wife and his sister-in-law, he has been dishonest with the two real women in his lives. Second, most of his popular fiction is essentially a clubbing of generalizations or sentimental outbursts or naïve surface-level assumptions or mere mediocre analysis.

The student exposes him brutally, thereby underlining some basic truths of life and art - Is there something called the absolute truth? And can a writer dispassionately pen down that truth without holding back anything? If he is truthful, has he compromised with the privacy of his near ones? If he manipulates facts, how honest will he be in his autobiography? Will he tell the truth about how his Gandhian ideals and that his active participation in the freedom struggle did not stop him from betraying his wife? Will he own up to his violation of the confidence of close relationships?

Unfortunately, Patke's writer hero (Bhide, who is otherwise such a good actor) is unable to bring out all that turmoil. He does not have the aura of a popular writer who has seduced multiple women in his life. The student (Nilima Deshpande) is pathetic and the worst-rehearsed. She needs basic lessons in stage movements, though the director is also at fault in her case. Seema Deshmukh (wife) and Latika Gore (sister-in-law) are reasonably effective in their roles. But what is lacking is the directorial control over all these characters who seem to be wandering and lost. One really misses Chetan Datar, the veteran director of Awishkar group, who could have easily streamlined all these faults. Needless to add, Patke is sure to improve his act after receiving some feedback about the 'Atmakatha' that was missing!

The writer is a Media Assistant with the Public affairs Section of the American Centre, Mumbai. A keen observer of theatre and other Performing Arts, she is a freelance writer and a journalism teacher at the Xavier's Institute of Communications (XIC). She also writes a fortnightly column on Marathi theatre trends for Time Out Mumbai.