Word: mahabharata
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deeds of each of these ancestors, in creating and sustaining the world, form an immense narrative beside which the Mahabharata is a mere short story, and all of them are embedded in the sacred sites that cover Australia. (From the Aboriginal point of view, in fact, Australia is one big sacred site.) Hence as curator Peter Sutton puts it in the catalog, "The land is already a narrative -- an artifact of intellect -- before people represent it. There is no wilderness...
Director Peter Brook's work in the 1980s includes an 80-minute condensation of Bizet's Carmen and a 9 1/2-hour adaptation of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. He is probably best remembered for his 1970 A Midsummer Night's Dream, which uncovered weighty conflicts of the sexes and social classes in what had been seen as amiably airy farce. That production, gymnastic and visually abstract, signaled a revolutionary intent from the first glance. This time Brook's method is less obtrusive: though there are no sets to speak of, the costumes are in period and the air is abuzz...
...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...
...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...
...point a deity confronts the poet who is purportedly narrating the epic and demands, "Vyasa, which of us has invented the other?" That is art at its most self- aggrandizing. Yet how indeed does man come to comprehend anything beyond his immediate world if not through the artist? The Mahabharata is studded with such observations and moves at a pace leisurely enough to allow audiences to ponder them a moment -- but not too deeply -- before being caught up in the next fable, the next tapestry brought to life. If not always intense or profound, the result...