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September 30, 2016

Three decades ago, this hushed and hallowed place was a theater of war. Surviving witnesses still speak with awe of what they heard and saw then — of flights of white-feathered arrows and vaulting bodies, and the ever-rising din of voices in eternal conflict. The smoke has now cleared at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the frenzy of warfare gone still. Peter Brook, the director responsible for the artfully arranged cosmic carnage called “The Mahabharata,” staged here in 1987, has now returned in contemplation with “Battlefield,” an elegiac play of stark and uncommon beauty. Mr. Brook, one of the great forces in world theater since the 1950s, is back to tell what is essentially the same story, or at least an epilogue to it. Created with his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, “Battlefield” revisits the bloodied fields of “The Mahabharata,” the ancient Sanskrit narrative that is the world’s longest epic poem, which was adapted into nine hours of stage time for Mr. Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord by Jean-Claude Carrière.

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