Word: brooke
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...MAHABHARATA A 9 1/2-hour adaptation by Peter Brook, elder statesman of the avant-garde, of the great Hindu antiwar epic. Inevitable longueurs and some uncertain English from a polyglot cast, but spellbinding ritual and visual metaphor...
...Majestic Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music is puckish too, but in a different way. An abandoned turn-of-the-century beaux arts vaudeville hall, it has been transformed into a performance space (and folly) in which Avant- Garde Director Peter Brook could present his 9 1/2-hour epic, The Mahabharata. The firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates has implanted modern plumbing and electrical systems but otherwise has maintained the look of desuetude: chipped plaster and peeling paint, exposed beams and brickwork. The Piranesianism is a bit coy, maybe, but more affecting than much standard spic- and-span preservation...
...stage -- caked with earth, puddled with water and transformed into a dusty plain in primeval India -- resonates with such ritual images, haunting metaphors, aphoristic dialogue and spiritual searching. The event, viewable in a marathon day or in three installments, is The Mahabharata, the most ambitious production yet by Peter Brook, 62, the visionary elder statesman among stage auteur directors. A French version originated in Avignon in 1985, then played to sold-out houses in Paris in 1986. The English-language premiere transfers this week from the Los Angeles Festival, where it played in a cavernous studio, to a twelve-week...
...works, the Mahabharata is a glorious welter of incident and digression, evoking not just a central story of ruinous war but an array of myths and human archetypes and an animal world aquiver with magic. It would be hard to overstate its role as a wellspring of Indian culture. Brook, however, was drawn to its transcending themes: man's joyous awakening to nature and love and duty, the menacing lures of vanity and ambition...
That is debatable. But Foreign Affairs Editor William Hyland, a veteran Soviet watcher, agrees up to a point. The ideological component of the East- West struggle has receded, he writes in his new book Mortal Rivals, and that could fundamentally change the way the game is played. "Ideological conflicts brook no compromises," he explains, "but power and interests are negotiable commodities...