Check out Jay Gabler’s review in the TC Daily Planet.
Gabler comments on the difficulty of getting the full content and implications of the Ramayana from a brief summary. Right. . . I slogged through the Wikipedia entry without much success understanding the higher planes of the narrative. I can just add one element of clarity: embodiment is important in the narrative (and in the culture–I think that’s fair to say). So the doubled characters of Dhvee are in play with the story itself. . .
Gabler says something interesting about the classical tradition:
Both the challenge and the appeal of any classical tradition—think Western classical music, or classical ballet—lie in its practitioners’ commitment to enacting (at its best) profound expression within a strictly circumscribed vocabulary.
This is true–but I want to add a little to it–which is that the language of a classical form makes up a world. Ideally you cross into that world at some point; you cease to see the vocabulary itself.