Written between 1985 and 1994, Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Wada Chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion), Magna Talyat (The Pond) and Yugant (Apocalypse) form his popular Wada Trilogy. At its center is the Deshpande family, whose story traces the decline of a once-prosperous feudal household amid a changing rural India. This weekend, theatre director Anuradha Kapur returns to their world with Virasat, commissioned by KNMA and developed in residence at Black Box Okhla. The three plays have been telescoped into one continuous three-hour performance, and presented at Sunder Nursery from September 24 to 27 at its Sunken Garden, 7 pm onwards.
Kapur first encountered the trilogy in the 1990s and staged it with the NSD Repertory Company in Delhi in 2013. Thirteen years later, the play continues to draw her back. “There is no story about modern India, quite in the same way as the Wada trilogy,” she says. For her, Deshpandes' story also carries resonances beyond Dharangaon — from the crumbling of the feudal order and patriarchal values to the ways in which spaces shape women’s lives.
Inside the wada
In Virasat, the wada — a large mansion in Marathi — is more than a backdrop to the family’s conflicts. Scenographer Deepan Sivaraman places a water body at its centre, with different spaces of the household arranged around it. There is the kitchen, where much of the women’s labour takes place; the rooms, corridors and jhoolas; and the space associated with the family patriarch, Bhaskar.
Performed in an arena, the production gives audiences no single view of the action. Instead, spectators look into the house from different angles; their view is determined by where they sit. “Each viewpoint changes the story slightly because you are actually seeing through a room,” Kapur explains. “End-on theatre will focus on one part of the story, and what happens in the background is not visible. Here, there is no background or foreground.” A spectator may be only a foot away from one actor while another action unfolds elsewhere in the house. What is visible to one person may remain hidden from another.
The three-hour duration further complicates that relationship between audience and family. “Who are you? Are you part of the family? Are you part of the neighbourhood? Are you a bystander? Are you looking through a window just by chance?” Kapur asks. “Because you are seated there for three hours, you have to make a decision about how much a part of the family you are and how much distance you have from them.”
The extended runtime also allows everyday actions to unfold in real time. Meals are prepared, served and eaten on stage; dishes are washed, vegetables cut and rooms cleaned. Actors do not simply disappear when they are not central to a scene. They sleep, listen, wait and carry on with domestic routines. The absence of exits is another part of this theatrical language. Unless a character has a reason to leave the house, the actors remain within the space. They have to sleep, listen, clean or simply exist on stage.
Kapur describes this as a form of “hyperrealism”, an attempt not to fake the ordinary actions that make up domestic life. “If there is a kitchen here, what the women do is cook in real time,” she says. “They will make poha or halwa, but they have to do it in the way that they do it at home.”
For the actors, this means coordinating real materials and actions with dialogue and movement. It also foregrounds the labour that keeps the wada functioning. “The nature of intimacy or the nature of claustrophobia or the nature of feeling, one of the things that has come through both times, but very clearly this time again, is that the women enter the wada and mostly, except once they’re dead, the option of going out of the wada is scarcely there,” Kapur says. “Their lives are spent waiting, cleaning, presenting the meals, being there, keeping the house going.”
A story that travels
Returning to the trilogy after 13 years has also meant rethinking how its three independent plays speak to one another. Kapur has edited the work to follow the family across decades, tracing characters from youth into adulthood and old age, while showing one generation gradually handing over the space and its history to another.
For all its larger social and political resonances, Kapur returns to what she calls Elkunchwar’s “epic of the everyday”. The trilogy moves from the decline of a feudal household towards a landscape marked by drought and deprivation, bringing agrarian distress and migration into focus. “When it was written, it had another resonance,” she says. “But now forced migration, climate migration, and climate refugees are a part of our attention now.”
The drought in Elkunchwar’s world, she says, can therefore be read both as an existential condition and as a physical reality. A landscape ravaged by drought forces people to move, while the lure of the city brings its own frustrations and disappointments. Kapur points to the migrations witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic as another contemporary lens through which the trilogy can be viewed. “The changing relationship to land, the lure of the cosmopolitan city and the lack of jobs come up in very stark ways,” she says.
For Kapur, the trilogy’s enduring power lies in the way its intimate family story remains inseparable from the larger world around it. “The environment describes the Deshpande family as much as the Deshpandes do,” she says.