I'm trying to imagine the Hartford Stage production meeting at which this tragically misguided "Oedipus the King" was cooked up:
"This season the emphasis is on great, classic playwrights: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Williams, Moliere. How about a Greek tragedy?"
"'Oedipus' is a good one. Confident ruler of a plague-stricken people brought down by fate and his own hubris."
"Sure, but let's give it a modern twist. What if we set it in Africa and make the plague that's gripping Thebes a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic?"
"You mean rewrite the script to make it African and not Greek?"
"No, we can do it straight, but with an all-black cast, dressed in timeless but distinctly African costumes -- Susan Hilferty can whip up some colorful robes -- and we can have a trio of live musicians at the side of the stage doing African percussion. We can also put an AIDS information table in the lobby and solicit audience donations to support treatment and awareness."
"But Oedipus, king of Thebes, in some African village? How does that work?"
"OK, how about we do a kind of play-within-a-play thing. Here's what: a traveling theater group performing 'Oedipus' outside a rural clinic, where the afflicted villagers have gathered to see this ancient tragedy that's like a metaphor for their own tragic condition."
Of course, this isn't the conversation that actually took place, but ... what on earth could they have been thinking?
Take the plague-equals-AIDS concept just one step further and you wade into big trouble. The generous explanation is that they just weren't thinking, because the alternative -- that these errors of judgment came with knowledge aforethought -- is unthinkable:
"Let's see, what are the most common stereotypes about sub-Saharan Africa?"
"How about the image of the superstitious savage under the spell of shamans and black magic? That could translate into Apollo's oracle at Delphi, which predicts the tragic outcome of the drama, as well as the riddle of the Sphinx, which Oedipus solves and is rewarded with the crown."
"There's also that really racist notion that postcolonial Africans still aren't fit to govern themselves because they're so backward, constantly having coups and civil wars and setting up corrupt dictatorships. That's an exact parallel to Oedipus, who is a king with absolute power who got there after offing his own father, and it turns out he's the corrupt cause of the sickness in Thebes."
"And what about the AIDS crisis itself? Hasn't it grown into a pandemic, with 11 million victims so far in Southern Africa, because the people are supposedly so depraved and promiscuous? Just like Oedipus, who beds his own mother!"
Indeed, the implicit message delivered by holding "Oedipus" up as a mirror of the AIDS crisis is one that's all too common in certain reactionary circles: "Don't you dare think this disease has some outside cause. You've brought it on yourselves."
Of course, none of this is explicit in the production. Even the AIDS connection is only expressly made in the lobby displays and the program notes. If you read those, you'll discover that the intended parallel to "Oedipus" is the refusal of some African leaders to take the crisis seriously, like Oedipus in denial about his own responsibility for the sickness in Thebes.
But those other connections stick to the concept as unintended and fatal baggage. If it weren't so sick, the idea of setting "Oedipus" in an AIDS clinic would almost be funny. Like doing "Titus Andronicus" at a leper colony.
Maybe it's these cruel interpretational ironies that make the production itself so slack and half- hearted, as if the director and his cast were trying to shy away from them. Again, that's the logical conclusion, because director Jonathan Wilson is capable of much better work than he shows here. He proved that in his superb production of "Dutchman" last season, which had all the pathos, horror and up-to-the-minute relevance that this production aims for and completely misses.
Here, though, he is ham-fisted -- or, to extend the "Oedipus" association, club-footed. He has cobbled together a show that if staged by a community theater group would be judged "pretty good" but for a professional company is just shameful.
Wilson has tried to achieve an uneasy balance between classic formality and a more modern vernacular, but the mix is muddy at best. Some of his actors show some evidence of some talent, but he seems to have given them little guidance, because there is no coherent performance style.
Reg Flowers is an oddly limp, almost fey Oedipus, standing rather passively in his royal robes and delivering half his lines as if he's not quite sure what they mean. On the other hand, Stephanie Berry, as his mother Jocasta, is overheated, her shrill pronouncements punctuated by grand but stiff gestures. At yet another extreme is Lawrence James, who plays the old shepherd who reveals part of the mystery with a wry naturalism that would be charming if it had anything in common with any of the other performances on this stage.
The chorus of Theban elders, commenting on and questioning the dramatic action, is represented by two performers (while the circle of clinic patients looks on in mute passivity). Novella Nelson is effective, with a rich voice and regal bearing, but Jenard Burks is awkward and plodding.
The community theater feel is only reinforced by the participation of a half-dozen (uncredited!) schoolgirls, apparently students in a Hartford neighborhood ethnic dance class, who leap onto the stage from time to time for brief interludes of African dance. They are lively young things, but there's little joy and no spontaneity in their movements. They are kids who have been well drilled (by choreographer Kevin Iega Jeff) and are performing dutifully on Amateur Night.
Set designer Scott Bradley's rendering of the facade of the clinic, which doubles as the Theban royal house, resembles nothing so much as an enormous, round brick oven with its top crumbled away -- perhaps symbolizing the destruction of domestic life in this plague time?
Wrongheaded though it may be, the production is well-intentioned. And art as social commentary, illuminating a crisis of genuinely tragic proportions, is certainly commendable and even necessary. But asking a classic to offer up neat contemporary parallels is a tricky business. Like Oedipus consulting the Delphic Oracle, you may not get the answer you want.