An Epic Journey Through Myth THE MAHABHARATA

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

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.

In its blend of spectacle with simplicity, The Mahabharata recalls the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby and the medieval religious play cycle produced in 1985 by Britain's National Theater. Brook's stage blazes with light and color -- not from some high-tech console but from torches and candles and vivid carpets methodically unrolled across the ground. There are no turntables or massive set pieces, no cinematic special effects. The tone of the talk -- conversational but carefully not colloquial -- suggests listening to a tribal elder around the fire. Like the Bible, the Mahabharata is a creation epic stretching over generations. And like Nickleby, Brook's adaptation depicts how a man must unravel his heritage and true identity to break a cycle of suffering. After hours of battle and a description of a field strewn with 18 million corpses, the final scene shows orderly everyday life happily unfolding along a riverbank. But the narrator prepares the audience to disregard this vision with the warning that justice is merely another of life's illusions. In Western civilization, tragedy is defined by the Greek notion of a self-imposed flaw: it can be avoided. In The Mahabharata, the essence of tragedy is its inevitability. Even those who foresee what is coming simply submit to fate.

Brook inevitably simplifies the story and philosophy, at times verging on a kind of Eastern Philosophy's Greatest Hits glibness; the original epic's most famous section, the Bhagavadgita, is compressed into a few offhand remarks. The production is international in the best and worst senses: at times universal, at times merely polyglot. Brook, whose 1970 Midsummer Night's Dream reawakened audiences to the play's sexual and class anger and whose 1981 Carmen reduced Bizet's opera to a fervid 80 minutes, is British. Playwright Jean-Claude Carriere, author of many screenplays, including six for Luis Bunuel, is French. The 30 actors come from West Germany, Poland, Senegal, Trinidad, Turkey and Bali, among other places, and at least seven are making English-language acting debuts. Whatever the longueurs and idiosyncrasies, all cavils are minor. The work itself is major, a spellbinding journey through myth and fable, blessed with an unfailing sense of wonder.