THE NEW NOMADS.(Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssees)." )(Theater Review)

In hide-and-seek, it's a tragedy if you are not found: this turns out to be the existential predicament of the refugees who populate Ariane Mnouchkine's pageant of the uprooted, "Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssees)." The saga, which has a Homeric sweep, is told in two parts and sixty-two scenes over six hours. (The Theatre du Soleil's production runs at the Lincoln Center Festival until July 31st.) Set in notorious detention camps in France, Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia, the story is played out by thirty-six actors onstage, and, around the world, by the twelve million people who are trapped in a ghost life of detention centers and legal rigmarole. As the irony of its title indicates--a caravanserail, which is based in part on a Persian word for "palace," is a spacious place where caravans put up--Mnouchkine's odyssey bears witness to the blighted new nomads who wander the world, looking for a landfall to call home.

Mnouchkine improvised the piece in six months from stories that she and two of her actors had collected from refugees between 1999 and 2002. "I hope the audience will follow our wanderings as we followed yours," Mnouchkine writes to one of her informants in the supertitle that opens Part 2. Wandering and unknowing are the experiences of the asylum seekers; they are also the tropes of this sprawling production. Through the caprice of history, these emigres find themselves with no rights, no voice, no place. (Half of the world's refugees are under the age of eighteen, and, as Caroline Moorehead writes, in "Human Cargo," "almost five per cent of these are unaccompanied minors, travelling the world on their own." Another seven million refugees have been, according to the World Refugee Survey, "warehoused for ten years or more.") The narrative of their lives has been severed, a rupture whose loss includes their cultural idiom, what Eva Hoffman has called "the encoded memory of heritage." The refugees are disinherited; they are frozen in time. "We have no importance," one says. "That is our life." To the dispossessed, Mnouchkine's capacious spectacle is a big-hearted, always elegant, gesture of reclamation.

Mnouchkine's storytelling is more about presentation than about penetration. Here, the actors dress underneath the bleacher seats, so theatrical artifice is the first thing the audience encounters: instruments, musicians, props, the whole machinery of make-believe become a part of the spectacle. Mnouchkine speaks through line, space, sound, and superbly controlled images. Words for her are merely decoration on the design of movement. Her interest is in pattern, not psychology. (Most of the drama is in pantomime; the characters have only washes of personality.) It is not fact, which is the realm of journalism, but feelings, which is the realm of the theatre, that is the play's offering. "Le Dernier Caravanserail" is really a dramatic inquiry into desolation, a way of making the audience imagine an unmoored life. To this end, dollies, skillfully manipulated by the crew, transport the characters into view and out of sight. Like surreal figments in a dream, the refugees constantly scuttle across the vast expanse of the empty stage, propelled as if their feet never touched the ground. Glide replaces drift. The swift movement takes naturalism out of the narrative and gives the people and their stories a sort of mythic metabolism. The device also helps to engineer the nightmarish internal sense of hubbub and horror. At the same time, the spaces the refugees inhabit in the play--detention cabins, telephone booths, boat decks, hovels--are small, tight, claustrophobic, and mean. Most of the action takes place in a sort of Rubic's Cube that Mnouchkine has devised to give isolation angularity and insight: from almost every angle, the refugees are caged.

Elie Wiesel said, "Refugees live in a divided world between countries in which they cannot live, and countries which they may not enter." This division is sensationally conjured in the first image of "Le Dernier Caravanserail," in which refugees attempt to cross a roiling river between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, hoisted over ...