Mareez

The longest-running Gujarati play. Two hundred performances and counting, at Prithvi Theatre continuously since 2004. Abbas Abdul Ali Vasi was born in Surat in 1917 into a Dawoodi Bohra family. He dropped out of school in the second grade. By fourteen, he was composing ghazals. By his twenties, he was selling them for five rupees apiece to wealthy men who published them under their own names. He drank. He loved a woman who would not love him back. He married another who stood by him. He contracted tuberculosis. He wrote 178 poems that the literary establishment ignored and the people of Gujarat memorised. His pen name was Mareez — literally, ‘a sick man.’ They called him the Ghalib of Gujarat. He died in 1983 after being hit by an auto-rickshaw on a Mumbai street. Adapted by Vinit Shukla from Raeesh Maniar’s biography Mareez: Astitva Ane Vyaktitva, and directed by Manoj Shah, the play does not tell this story in order. It weaves poetry, fantasy, hallucination, and realism into a theatrical fantasia — inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s letters Dear Theo and Charles Bukowski’s Barfly. Dharmendra Gohil has played Mareez since the 2004 premiere — twenty years in the same role — with critics noting that ‘Mareez was in his veins.’ Kumkum Das plays Sona, his wife. The set comprises six paintings by Padma Bhushan-awarded artist Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh. The music is by Uday Mazumdar, a tabla player trained under Ravi Shankar.

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