A ‘Mahabharata’ Staged and Acted Entirely by South Asians—Why Not?

En Anglais Seulement

Adapting the Sanskrit epic into two-part spectacle for the Shaw Festival, Ravi Jain goes back to the beginning—and imagines the end.

Audiences in the West know the Indian epic the Mahabharata, if they know it at all, via Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière’s groundbreaking nine-hour stage adaptation, originally staged in France in 1985, then in Brooklyn in 1987, and finally filmed in 1989. Billed as an “international” production, it had a multiracial cast and toured widely around the world, but it was unavoidably and properly received as a Western “take” on the saga.

In India and among the Indian diaspora, of course, this 4,000-year-old Sanskrit epic is more than just a story, though in popular culture it has taken the form of a popular comic book and a 94-part television series, and is performed and/or told, formally and informally, in a variety of settings. As director Ravi Jain of Toronto’s Why Not Theatre told me recently, “Most of how we experience it is around the dinner table with food, and you’ll get one story out of context.”

Source: American Theatre