The Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata has been adapted many times over in oral retellings, plays, movies, comic books and more. Consisting of over 100,000 verses, the poem has so many stories that picking which ones to tell is a statement in itself.
And making that decision can pose its own challenges as Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes, co-artistic directors of the Toronto-based theater company Why Not, learned when they went about adapting it. Now they are bringing their expansive two-part contemporary staging, which premiered in 2023 at the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada, to Lincoln Center, where it will run from Tuesday through June 29.
Their adaptation is based on the poet Carole Satyamurti’s retelling of the epic, which, at its core, is the story of two warring sets of cousins — the Kauravas and the Pandavas — trying to control a kingdom. The poem is part myth, part guide to upholding moral values and duty — or dharma. Some of the epic incorporates the Bhagavad Gita, a philosophical text on Hindu morality, which is framed as a discussion between Prince Arjuna, a Pandava and a skilled archer, and Lord Krishna, a Hindu God who acts as Arjuna’s teacher.
Jain, 45, began developing the piece in 2016 after receiving a $375,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, the country’s public arts funder. Fernandes, 36, joined him on the project two years later after finishing graduate school in France. Jain described an early version of the script in an interview as “feminist” and “self-referential.” But the pandemic made them rethink which stories could best drive home the point of dharma — a central tenet of the text.
“To build a civilization, those with the most power must take care of those with the least,” Jain said, referring to the epic’s message. “In the animal kingdom, the strong eat the weak. There’s no problem with that. But humans have empathy, and we can build a civilization where we’re not just those who eat and those who are eaten, but rather those who feed and those who are fed.”
“That idea,” he continued, “really kind of hooked us into the why of this story.”
The ambitious work is a mix of experimental and classical storytelling, and features 15 principal cast members as well as six musicians who perform onstage during the show’s first half.
Part 1 is rooted in a more traditional narrative, helped along by Fernandes, who operates as a narrator, and Indian classical dance numbers, a common vehicle for transmitting the stories of the Mahabharata. The piece begins with the tale of Arjuna, who helped satiate the starving fire god Agni by burning down a forest he inherited. This in turn causes Takshaka, a snake, to vow revenge for Arjuna’s actions. Later, the story explores the union of King Shantanu and Satyavati, the daughter of a fisherman chieftain. Other notable stories include Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava, gambling away his kingdom as a result of a rigged dice game.
Part 2 is more contemporary, including television screens and recorded sound. The whole enterprise becomes a marriage of the ancient and modern. (The second half also presents the Bhagavad Gita as a Sanskrit opera.)
The effort to mix modernity with a classical approach, the creative team said, was a crucial part of the choreography. When a war is depicted in Part 2, the battle is performed as a Kathakali dance — a classical form originating in the southern Indian state of Kerala, and one commonly used in epic portrayals.
But Jain and Fernandes ran into a problem: Kathakali dance has an established canon that has not evolved. So when Jay Emmanuel, the dancer and actor who portrays Shiva, was tasked with choreographing the numbers, he discovered during a trip to India that the Kathakali form didn’t include some of the stories they were trying to tell.
So the creative team asked the gurus teaching Emmanuel for their blessing to like invent new stories in the Kathakali form.
“The audience goes through a journey of storytelling practices and forms,” said Fernandes, who directed the production with Jain. “That journey is part of making you feel like you’ve gone somewhere because you’ve experienced so much.”
The Mahabharata has proved to be an endless source of inspiration. Just this year, the Joyce Theater in Manhattan has hosted two adaptations: One from the Minneapolis-based dance company Ragamala, which presented a show called “Children of Dharma,” with selected tales from the text, and then Akram Khan’s “Gigenis,” which tells the story of Gandhari, a character from the poem.
Among the more notable adaptations are Peter Brook’s reinterpretation for both stage and film in the late 1980s (Khan was in the stage version as a teenager), and Prakash Jha’s 2010 Hindi-language film “Raajneeti,” which, inspired by the poem, depicts two modern-day feuding families.
“It’s a very good story, just as Adam and Eve is a pretty good story, too,” said Wendy Doniger, a retired University of Chicago professor who studied and translated the poem for decades.
Doniger, who also wrote a foreword for Satyamurti’s version, also recalled that Attipat K. Ramanujan, a poet and fellow scholar of Indian literature, once told her, “No Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time.”
She credited the longstanding cultural interest in the Mahabharata to the fact that aside from the central story of feuding brothers, the poem meanders into tangents that have little do with the battle and creates a deep well of tales.
“Every time anyone sits down to make a fire, catches breath after a big battle, someone says, ‘Tell us a story,’” Doniger said. “In the Mahabharata, you tell a lot of other stories that have nothing to do with the Mahabharata. It’s the great folklore compendium of ancient India as well. So every story you ever heard of is somewhere in the Mahabharata.”
The challenge for the creative team behind the adaptation now at Lincoln Center was striking a balance between their voices and the familiar text.
“When I try to explain it to a Western audience,” Fernandes said, “there’s no point of reference for something like the Mahabharata and South Asian culture because it is both sacred and spiritual and also pop culture and Marvel comic book series.”
Both Jain and Fernandes described the writing of their piece as a profoundly moving experience, especially as the world changed around them, which included the #MeToo movement and a pandemic. In addition, Jain and Fernandes both became parents after they began to create the show.
“The pandemic gave us all this time to really think about privilege, power and all the conversations that everyone was having,” Jain said. “And it started to really ground us into something more contemporary.”
Even as the Mahabharata’s stories have remained the same for millenniums, the ones they have chosen for this show feel more urgent in an increasingly isolated world.
“It captures a deep question that we will continue to struggle with. What is my relationship to my neighbor?” Jain said. “Should I be afraid of you, or should I treat you like family?”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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