Word: mahabharata
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hours the 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...
...source material is the longest epic of world literature, a 100,000- stanza poem about seven times the combined length of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Like those 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...