Chanting in the dusky gloom before a battle, a robed figure stoops and ignites a circle of blue flame in the red clay soil around him. With one quick twist, a woman fluffs her white veil into swaddling and so conjures up a baby in arms. Horns blare as a crowd of celebrants, resplendent in red, holds aloft a richly caparisoned tent for the wedding of a blind king. A master of military arts orders a disciple to cut off his right thumb and thereby lose his strength and skill. "It is not cruelty," the teacher explains. "It is foresight."
For 9 1/2 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, to a twelve-week run in a more intimate theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The 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 and ambition and war.
The theatrical experience he has fashioned is part religious pageant, part sermon, part military panoply and part celebration of the reverberant power of language -- of vows, of curses, of omens. Above all it glories in the eternal reign of the storyteller, whose chronicles outlast the might of the captains and kings and, yes, even gods who figure in his tales. At one 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 is in the end hypnotically satisfying.