Arts & Culture

What: Mahabharata Part 1 (Karma) & Part 2 (Dharma)
Where: Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E.
When: Now, until Sun., April 27
Highlight: The gravitas instilled by its international ensemble’s classy line deliveries
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: It’s a stellar adaptation that gets the blood pumping and brain swirling

THERE’s SO MUCH  that I want to say about Why Not Theatre’s Mahabharata, to the point where this might wind up feeling like more of a think piece than a proper review. For that reason, allow me to frontload the praise before getting into the weeds: go see this show!

Co-playwrights/directors Miriam Fernandes and Ravi Jain have crafted a narrative that manages to touch upon the very soul of a shared human experience without compromising a profound sense of cultural particularity in pursuit of reductive universalism. Canadian Stage — which has been having good luck with impressive productions capable of getting the audience to come back for a second part — was wise to snap this up after its relatively brief premiere at the Shaw Festival in March of 2023.

Look, this is a long show (totalling nearly five hours across two instalments) and reviewing is (at least supposed to be) a short-form prose genre. Adapted from the 4000-year-old Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata is a sprawling tale of godlike mortals and humanized deities, following great warriors and dynastic succession crises, filled to the brim with characters trying to talk each other in and out of going to war. Above all, it’s about balancing the competing demands of the material and spiritual realms, putting the worldly quarrels into perspective by observing them from an overwhelmingly cosmic vantage point.

Every member of its large Canadian and international ensemble oozes with stage presence. Nigel D’Souza displays a knowingly ironic coolness in his affable portrayal of the omnipotent and omniscient Krishna. He steals every scene he’s in, unless, of course, he’s sharing the stage with Sukaina Venugopal’s Bhishma, who refuses to have her scenes usurped. Ravin J. Ganatra is every inch a king as Dhritarashtra, delivering every line with a powerfully regal timbre. Darren Kuppan plays his son, the villainous Duryodhana, perfectly conveying a princely sense of entitlement while glimmering with nuances that keep him from becoming a hiss-worthy pantomime baddie — though I did have a hard time buying him as a supposedly formidable warrior, one whom we’re eventually expected to believe can hold his own in single combat against the elephant-wrestling Bhima (Munish Sharma). His snivelling demeanour stands in stark opposition to Shawn Ahmed’s born-to-rule swagger as rival claimant Yudhishthira. Navtej Sandu masterfully handles one of the most complex character arcs, as Duryodhana’s steadfast right-hand Karna, grappling with split family loyalties and facing caste discrimination from the supposed “good guys” at every turn. Fernandes, herself, gently guides the audience along the journey as an engrossing Storyteller.

In Part 1, the stage is kept open concept, laying the machinery bare for the audience to observe its inner workings (set design by Lorenzo Savoini). Six musicians are visible in the background, scoring the action with John Gzowski and Suba Sankaran’s intense and ethereal compositions. But then, in Part 2, everything looks different. The musicians are kept out of sight, and the sparse staging becomes cluttered with furniture and livestream screens (projection design by Hana S. Kim), jarringly giving this ancient tale the aesthetic trappings of CNN’s 24-hour news broadcast.

This formal discordance, while patently intentional, nonetheless draws attention to the tricky business of serializing a theatrical performance. Though I was certainly never bored across Mahabharata’s enormous runtime, I wasn’t always convinced that it fully earned its length. Both instalments have their own intermissions, and some mild shortcomings come into focus when one scrutinizes how the material is distributed across its four acts.

Part 1’s first act is largely consumed by a dizzying barrage of genealogies and backstories, little of which ultimately proves to be necessary for grasping the core drama to come. “Don’t be confused by plots,” Fernandes’s Storyteller says with a grin early in the performance, but that’s better said than done.

Part 1’s second act is where everything begins clicking into place, as the manifold threads converge on our central characters. We’re plunged headfirst into riveting palace intrigue, setting the chessboard for the war that’s soon to come … in Part 2, of course.

Part 2’s first act spends a lot of time retreading ground from the previous episode, giving numerous reminders about how Yudhishthira lost his kingdom in a game of dice and how Princess Draupadi suffered indignities in Duryodhana’s court.

A possible takeaway: if you can only catch one of the instalments, you’d probably be fine with treating Part 2 as a standalone. However, this is the kind of production that wants you to feel its length, for therein lies its sense of mythic grandeur. This isn’t merely the tale of one family’s petty squabbles; it’s about the entire scope of a people’s journey, containing the intersecting histories that made this conflict inevitable, the millennia-spanning ramifications that followed and the lessons we can continue to learn from the players’ triumphs and follies.