The war is over. The Pandavas have wiped out their royal cousins, the Kauravas, and Yudisthira is the rightful king of all he surveys. Except that what he surveys is horrible to contemplate: a vulture’s paradise, where mad widows root through heaps of severed body parts, trying to reassemble their husbands. Too traumatized to claim his crown, Yudisthira declares the victory a defeat. How can he rule? What is there left to rule? He’d rather live in the woods, he tells his mother, “without tears, without joy . . . wandering aimlessly, seeking neither death nor life.”
Certainly, Yudisthira’s tale has its topical resonances. “If we say, for example, that victory is defeat,” Estienne says, “we can go to the Iraqi War or to whatever happens in the Middle East, which is linked to a victory which is a defeat. . . . People die and we do nothing and it is not even moral.” In that context, she considers Battlefield a reminder of all we ignore—all we have to ignore to have a semblance of a normal life.
4/5-4/8: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM Museum of Contemporary Art 220 E. Chicago 312-280-2660mca.org $40
