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Theatre: Battlefield at BAM

By Brian Hanson-Harding
arttimes online October 2016

Thirty years after staging his groundbreaking nine-hour theatrical take on The Mahabharata at what was then the BAM Majestic Theater, director Peter Brook recently took to the stage of that theater (now called the Harvey) to answer questions after a performance of Battlefield, a new (and considerably shorter) play based on what he called a “fragment” of the ancient Indian epic.

battlefield at bam

A woman who hadn’t yet been born when the first play was staged struggled to ask a question about some of the thorny philosophical issues the new play brings up. If the only certainty is death, she wondered, but even that isn’t certain because the soul lives again, then what is truth? The question evoked a chuckle from the audience and an impish smile from the 91-year-old auteur. In answer, he embarked on a story about a character who seeks to know the truth, and is ultimately told by another character, “I’ll tell you a story. . .”.

This anecdote is very emblematic of Battlefield, which tells the story of the victorious Pandava king Yudishtira, who feels the bitterness of his triumph in an apocalyptic civil war that pitted brother against brother. The king wonders how he can overcome his grief and rule justly and righteously after such internecine carnage. He seeks the wisdom of his mother, Kunti, his grandfather, Bhishma, and the old Kaurava king, Dhritarashtra. Through a series of stories from the epic, he learns lessons in life and morality.

Brook’s adaptation is clearly a play about storytellers, the kind of people who answer a philosophical question with a parable. A worm struggles to cross a road before being crushed by a chariot wheel. A falcon demands that a king cut off his own flesh to save a beautiful pigeon. A man suspended over a pit of horrors tilts his head up to catch drops of honey. Such parables represent a typically Hindu technique of coming at truth, readily seen in The Mahabharata and the Upanishads.

Brook’s characters are portrayed by a skilled cast of three men and one woman, who deftly switch roles with as little as a flick of a scarf or the grasping of one of the bamboo poles lying about the otherwise bare stage. The absence of sets allows both the imagination to soar and the actions of the actors to reverberate against the timeless backdrop of the unrestored, distressed BAM Harvey Theater, which (as the ruined Majestic) Brook chose as the venue for his nine-hour Mahabharata. As Dhritarashtra and Yudishtira mourn the waste and destruction wrought by their own pride and intransigence, the thousands of corpses lit up by the rising sun, the timelessness of the ancient Indian wisdom becomes readily apparent.

To the backdrop of the ruined, richly lit walls of the Harvey’s stage and the sound of a single hand drum, the actors one moment portray characters from the warring tribes, and then the next moment they are animals in a parable, evoking laughter from the audience, and at one point interacting with the audience in search of “poor people” in need of charity.

Yudishtira, plagued by his dharma to rule as a just king, and struggling with his inner desire to become a renunciant and live on “roots and fruits” in the forest, reminds us of the cyclical nature of history, as he sees omens portending another war.

In this way, he is as timeless and universal as the unrestored Harvey Theater, which, by revealing its layers of construction and decay, invoke the ancient agglomeration of stories, which have become The Mahabharata.

editor's note: This US premiere ran from September 28 through October 9, 2016. Brook’s rarely seen films are screened in a BAMcinématek retrospective, Peter Brook: Behind the Camera, Oct 10—20.

(Brian Hanson-Harding lives in Rutherford, N.J.)