The Mahabharata: A Timeless Retelling

Why Not Theatre’s bold, multidisciplinary adaptation of the Mahabharata drew a rapt audience at Lincoln Center’s vibrant summer arts festival “Summer for the City.” The Toronto-based ensemble’s co-artistic directors Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes anchored the script upon Carole Satyamurti’s “Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling.” The 4,000-year-old Sanskrit epic, so foundational to Indian culture, offers thought-provoking contemplations for all time. It weaves tale upon tale of a family feud as it explores philosophical and spiritual ideas central to human reflection: What is our purpose? Can justice be attained through violence?

Performance

Why Not Theatre: “Mahabharata”

Place

Lincoln Center, New York, NY, June 24, 2025

Words

Karen Greenspan

Why Not Theatre's “Mahabharata.” Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

This large-scale narrative is told in two distinct parts—Part One: Karma: The Life We Inherit and Part Two: Dharma: The Life We Choose. Each part is presented as a separate two and half-hour program, which I attended in a full-day marathon during the last weekend of June. Rife with plots for power and revenge, raging battles, games of dice, mistaken identities, moral struggle, and ultimate transcendence, the tales unnest like strands of wool gently pulled from a large mass and spun into yarn. Miriam Fernandes, as the narrator, is onstage throughout most of the production continuously spinning one story after another in an amazing feat of spoken expression.

The storytelling extravaganza uses spoken narrative, live music, a Sanskrit opera, physical theater, and various forms of Indian dance, blended into a coherent physical language by choreographer Brandy Leary. Lorenzo Savoini’s set design ranges from the baroque to minimalist and includes brass bowls of fire, a carpet of red gravel encircling the central space, a backdrop of snakes (hanging ropes), and large screens with evocative projections. The lighting design by Kevin Lamotte often saturates the stage with intense reds and golds amplifying the richness of the court, the blaze of fires, the impulse towards rage, vengeance, and transcendence.

The overarching theme is that violence begets violence. The story revolves around an inter-family conflict, as two warring sets of cousins—the Kauravas and the Pandavas—vie for power and control over the kingdom of Kurukshetra. Part One – Karma lays out the ancestral history that leads to the great war. The word karma means “action” and implies that every action, intentional or accidental, has far-reaching consequences. Hence the actors depict years of karmic actions—marriages, births, exiles, reunions, curses, and conflict. Wedding scenes pulse with boisterous Bhangra dancing replete with jumping and handclapping; Ellora Patnaik, skilled in the Odissi form, dancing as Queen Kunti dances the divine conceptions and births of her five sons—the Pandavas. Meanwhile, Queen Gandhari dramatizes her own unique two-year pregnancy, labor, and delivery of 100 sons—the Kauravas. Her first-born Duryodhana, played by Darren Kuppan, emerges and somersaults to life with street dance and martial arts moves reflecting his aggressive nature.

Why Not Theatre's “Mahabharata.” Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

Jealousy and struggle for power pervade the relations between the two sets of cousins. Actor-dancer, Jay Emmanuel, shows up in multiple roles with his bravura dancing. As Prince Eklavya, he dances his archery regimen with precise training postures. A few scenes later, in the role of King Drupada (father-in-law to the Pandavas), Emmanuel sends clouds of dust flying as he repeatedly jumps onto the red gravel and flicks a leg backward in a fiery war dance. On the stage now drenched in red light, he dances his prayer to Lord Shiva to grant him destructive power. Emmanuel completes the scene with a spinning spree as vocalist Suba Sankaran belts out the prayer “Shiva Shakti Ho.”

In a peacemaking effort, the blind king Dhritarashtra decides to divide the kingdom equally between the cousins. This only further inflames their jealous rage! An infamous game of dice ensues to settle the conflict without bloodshed. As the eldest Pandava brother wagers each of his brothers, himself, and finally their (shared) wife Draupadi in round after round, he loses all claim to the kingdom. Each round of dice begins with mounting tension amplified with handclapping percussion by the players and the live musicians. Amid a courtly set of crystal chandeliers and baroque furnishings, the Pandavas lose the game of dice and Draupadi is publicly debased by the Kauravas. Part One concludes with the stage lights increasing to blinding intensity as the rage of the Pandavas boils over—each one cursing the Kauravas.

Part Two: Dharma centers upon the war and the “Bhagavad Gita.” The “Gita,” as it is frequently called, is a spiritual poem, or song, in which Krishna advises on moral duty, or dharma. This production renders the spiritual classic in the form of a sublime opera, sung in Sanskrit by Canadian soprano Meher Pavri. Costumed in a gold sari with a glittering crown topped with peacock feathers, she delivers an aria that conveys Krishna’s discourse. With breathtaking perfection, the “Gita” concludes with a series of ascending scales as a brilliant yellow sun dissolves into a vision of deep space filled with countless celestial bodies.

Why Not Theatre's “Mahabharata.” Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

The great war plays out as a dance. Jay Emmanuel dances the entire war center stage as a Kathakali-styled solo while the other actors play it out on the stage periphery, in the aisle, and on the screen. As Shiva, the god of destruction, Emmanuel delivers a no-holds-barred performance garbed in a white cotton dhoti, face paint, a wig of dreadlocks, godly ornaments, and metallic finger extensions. He leaps from warrior posture to posture and then circles the stage hopping on one foot with arms in fighting gestures. He dances victorious triumphs and tragic defeats—staggering backward, succumbing to death, and spinning into union with the divine.

In the final victory dance, Emmanuel performs the traditional Kathakali bloody disembowelment—the hero’s sacrificial act and duty to restore order within the cosmos. To the pounding, adrenaline-building percussion, Emmanuel shimmies his shoulders, his tongue extended to taste the blood. As the Pandava victor, he mimes tearing open the enemy’s body, bathing his hands and face in the blood, and ripping out the bloody entrails. And with this, the war ends.

Krishna departs the stage predicting another war and speaking sage wisdom, “We are born; we die. And, in between, we briefly act. We are like transient bubbles arising on the surface of a stream . . . ”

Karen Greenspan

Karen Greenspan is a New York City-based dance journalist and frequent contributor to Natural History Magazine, Dance Tabs, Ballet Review, and Tricycle among other publications. She is also the author of Footfalls from the Land of Happiness: A Journey into the Dances of Bhutan, published in 2019.

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