A troupe of South Asian actors, assembled from across the globe, gathered in a Manhattan rehearsal room in March to enact, in song and dance, one of the signature schisms of the 20th century: the British-mandated partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, which led to the displacement of some 15 million, deaths numbering more than a million and a legacy of barely contained border tension.

As one group of actors shouted “Allahu akbar!,” another answered with the Hindu chant “Har Har Mahadev.” In moves closer to stage combat than dance, the cast members clashed on the studio’s sprung floor as a love story played out poetically in the foreground — or rather, the end of a love story, as a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl are forever separated by partition, or batwara.

This scene isn’t in the film “Monsoon Wedding,” the 2002 indie hit from the director Mira Nair and the screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan that is the basis for their musical of the same name, running at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California through June 25.

But now is a different time, to put it lightly. What’s more, theater has different requirements than film, and brings fresh opportunities.