CITY OF LIGHT’S 11-HOUR GIFT FROM THE GODS

Near the end of the first part of the Peter Brook/Jean-Claude Carriere “Mahabharata,” a woman rose from her seat and, with a great shout of “C’est inadmissible!” (“This is inadmissible!”), stormed out of the theater making a great deal of noise.

It was never clear just what she was protesting. The events on stage? Unlikely. At that point in Carriere’s careful script, Draupadi, a gentle queen who has been lost by her king to enemy cousins in a lethal roll of the dice, is defending herself with a grace and dignity that could arouse only admiration.

Perhaps the spectator was angered by the length of the play (the first part alone is an unbroken two hours and 40 minutes), or had a reaction to the close feeling in the poorly ventilated Bouffes du Nord where the show takes place. Or she simply may have been off on a personal tangent for which there would be no explanation. But minutes later, when the intermission lights came up, five people were already fighting over the empty seat.

The incident was symptomatic of the enormous popularity of this show (which we may expect to see in English in Los Angeles as part of the international theater festival planned for the fall of 1987) and of the need to find a decent spot from which to watch it.

In Paris--leader in fashion--the theatrical fashion runs long this year. Nine-hour-plus performances are in. “The Mahabharata” can be seen in three evenings or, on certain days, seen as I saw it: as one 11-hour marathon. When you have to sit that long, you try to make it worth the effort.

(The other near sell-out in Paris is Le Theatre du Soleil’s “The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia,” reported on earlier in Daily Calendar. It’s performed as two consecutive evenings of 4 1/2 hours each.)

Getting a ticket to “Mahabharata,” however, is only half the battle. Ticket-holders often stand in line as long as two hours before showtime to secure a good unreserved seat. Padding was recently added to the theater’s primitive wooden benches, but at the smallish Bouffes, which uncannily resembles a bombed-out church left over from World War II, more than comfort is lost.

The piece was performed last summer as originally devised: as a large outdoor spectacle in which space itself was a key ingredient (more about this later). Confining this megawork to a relatively small stage ultimately shrinks one’s reaction to it--a problem experienced by this writer. One admires the attempt while failing to be viscerally moved by it. Perhaps the woman who protested so noisily was reacting to this loss.

She could not have been reacting to the content of the play. The original “Mahabharata,” written in Sanskrit by various authors over roughly eight centuries, is a mesmerizing saga of good and evil, gods and demigods, families locked in love and combat, with moral precepts reaching deep into Indian myth, religion and thought.

It is widely portrayed in Eastern theater and dance, including Kathakali and puppet theater, but this is the first time occidental audiences can see an accessible western version, in a Western language--French.

Since “The Mahabharata” is also not a text you pick up for light weekend reading (it is 100,000 couplets long--or, according to the show’s producers, 15 times longer than the Bible), Carriere has made no pretense at trying to match the adaptation to the original in any sense other than faithful evocation. The only valid question: Does this staged “Mahabharata” effectively communicate an impression of the original--including a sense of the tenderness, cruelty and fatalism in this mythical/mystical story?

The answer from someone who has not tackled the original is that it feels as if it does. Which is enough. Having read and admired only the “Mahabharata” according to Carriere (three volumes of about 130 pages each), its poetic teaching tone--neither pompous nor pontificating, but predicated on a great simplicity laced with occasional humor--strikes one as absolutely right.

“Maha,” the program tells us, means great. “Bharata” has several meanings, among them Hindu and Man. A suggested translation for “Mahabharata” is The Great Story of Mankind. The text (streamlined and shorn of numerous offshoots and subtexts) describes an archetypal quarrel between two sets of cousins--the noble Pandavas and the unprincipled Kauravas.

The former rule serenely over their empire, which makes the latter crazy. They want the power--have to have it. Why not win it in a fixed roll of the dice? Unwary, the Pandavas go for it, are pitted against a master player, lose everything and are exiled to the forest for 12 years--more than time enough to plot a fitting revenge.

But the delicately told story, sprinkled with aphoristic moralisms, is not just about the corruption of power. It’s about human destiny--something much more pernicious and inexorable. It shows rivalry of such blinding and irrational force that it threatens the survival of life itself. When a righteous prince calls for “divine arms,” he is refused because “They would consume the Earth.” Myths are nothing if not transparent.

What is surprising is that an idea of such contemporary urgency should be found in such an ancient text. No matter how much Carriere may have bent individual words to play into our modern context, he could not have altered the prophetic intransigence of this plot. He would not have wanted to.

“Mahabharata” eventually ends--in a raging holocaust of indiscriminate battles that grow more senseless as they grow more brutal and where enemies wear uniforms as interchangeable as their causes. One by one the heroes die. The victors, whoever they are by then, inherit a world that they have almost emptied. It is no accident that the decisive blow is struck only when duplicity triumphs--and that it comes from the gods themselves, prompting the archetypal betrayer, Duryodhana, to cry out, “Krishna, you are the root of this evil!”

By the time we reach the ultimate numbing and fearful catharsis, original purpose has long since been drowned in blood. “Give me an example of defeat,” an earlier voice had asked one of the princes. “Victory,” was the reply. Morality has no meaning. Survival is superfluous. Only the fire purifies.

Staged here as a tale told to a child by the poet/sage Vyasa, “The Mahabharata” is a gripping paradox of self-destruction and self-affirmation drenched in an Eastern consciousness. Its wisdom drops into the story with the grace of petals falling from a flower--a terrible warning to the willful human family (in which the blind seem to see best and the women are wisest) about its shocking appetite for horror.

This is a direction in which Brook has been traveling for a long time. He correctly eschews realism in favor of a familiar theatrical signature--freeze frames, arrows hand-carried to their targets, sand flying, water splashing, fire burning. We’ve seen variations of it in “The Conference of the Birds” (another Brook/Carriere collaboration), in their unornamented version of Bizet’s “Carmen” (seen in New York a couple of years ago) and in the ineffable “The Ik.” Sometimes it works; but sometimes excess simply is excessive.

“The Mahabharata” was launched as an outdoor production at the Avignon Festival last July and performed under the stars in a large stone quarry. Flames and torches created crucial, shadowy effects. Pools of water, used extensively, were dwarfed by the massive rock walls and fell into the natural context. The repetitive battle scenes of the third part had to feel less repetitive, domed and liberated as they were by the limitless night sky. Earth. Fire. Water.

At the Bouffes, the intentionally discolored back wall of the stage and its floor of red earth try to do for the production what a similar bleakness did for “La Tragedie de Carmen,” but it’s an uneasy fit. Stripped of its size, the grandeur is ragged. The crowded proximity of the audience and sheer lack of air make it hard to escape a degree of claustrophobia.

Even the musical support (performed on a variety of oriental instruments neatly grouped downstage left on a square of oriental carpet) is more punctuation than score. The shallow pool, straddling the rear of the stage and balanced by a small puddle down left, seems an artificial nod to nature.

Fires, torches, floating candles still try to create ritualistic effects, but in this cloistered environment they become overwhelming, robbing the atmosphere of too much of its already limited oxygen. Earth. Fire. Water. Indoors, they feel more like awkward concessions to realism than the universal underpinnings of a timeless story.

Despite the ritual and the theatricality, the battle scenes are problematic--exhaustive and exhausting (more so in the confinement of the Bouffes), loaded with too many pronouncements and false endings. Serial climaxes wane, particularly three hours’ worth. Which brings up another point: As long as one is condensing, are nine hours (plus another two taken up in breaks) required to tell this story? At a single sitting, the length taxes even the charged simplicity of Carriere’s script, crammed though it is with ideas well worth hearing.

These objections are made all the more emphatically in the face of what can only be described as a major achievement. “The Mahabharata” may be Brook’s masterwork and it suffers in Paris from the wrong kind of constraint. (Organizers of the Los Angeles festival promise that if the play is done indoors it will be in a more commodious space.) Its mix of the supernatural and the human, its imagery at once vivid and bleak, its scope, thought, plot and other complexities are staggering. But they need size and room to breathe.

“The Mahabharata” deserves to be seen in three segments for its impact to be fully savored. Time would distill its mysteries. “Beginnings are often secret,” says the poet Vyasa. So are endings. So is process. “Where are we going?” the child asks Vyasa about midway through the work. “I don’t know yet,” is the reply.