Throughout the 1960's, the Polish
theatre artist Jerzy Grotowski introduced a radical new vision for theatrical
performance in which stylistic movement and gesture, music, dance and text
combined in dramatically poetic ways to create a highly metaphoric and deeply
spiritual theatrical experience. Hugely influential, he also spawned a great
number of poseurs: pretentious, half-realized, artsy-fartsy travesties of
classic literature. Akropolis Performance Lab is no such thing.
This
powerful and fully realized production of Seneca's "Oedipus", in the poet Ted Hughes' muscled translation, achieves depth
and transcendence, literary clarity and theatrical invention, striking
immediacy and timeless consequence. Director Joseph Lavy (who also plays Oedipus) guides
his company with a firm hand, and as a result the vocal delivery of every actor
is precise and coherent, the music is evocative and touching, and the range of
the story is both grand and profoundly personal. To say the production is done
on a bare stage is both accurate and misleading. The stage, with two
straight-backed chairs, is filled with pure performance, the creation of an
imaginary world through suggestive objects, movement, sound and music, internal
and external emotional and spiritual expression.
Hughes'
translation of Seneca's text, with the bloody physicality of Roman tragedy, as
opposed to the religious elegance of Sophocles' Greek original, gives Oedipus'
tragic pursuit of self-knowledge a very physical pain, and the plague upon
Thebes a wrenching human body of traumatized nerve-endings and corporeal
suffering. In the same way, the play's opening scene, with the dimly-lit
carnality of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta, joined in a damned and ravenous
sexuality, uses his nudity to suggest both the vulnerability of his spirit and
the humanity of his desire, while Jocasta remains draped in a thin sheath of
both ignorance and invaded eroticism.
In
the Seattle press there has been a silly, tabloid controversy surrounding the
poster for this production, which shows the back of a naked man at a
semi-exposed woman's breast. Nudity is important in this production, but only
in the same ways and for the same reasons as a great many other theatrical
choices. It is always dramatically justified and mostly effective. Only an
extended scene with Creon (strongly played by Andrew Loviska) maintains the nudity for too
long, and it seemed to me that Jocasta (Holly Flowers) should have exposed her flesh
at the moment of her death, rather than pouring her blood on a silk slip. Most
importantly, though, the nudity is never titillating or gratuitous. It is always
about the external bodies of internal realities, the suffering flesh of
tormented spirits.
Far
more important theatrically is Jennifer Lavy's use of a variety of
Eastern-European musical styles to set Latin texts from the Carmina Burana. In place of the traditional
chorus, this haunting and beautifully sung music brings ceremony and solemnity
to the action, the religious "fear and pity" of tragedy. At times the
instruments are used only as accent, at other times to provoke the
circumstances, still again as a form of prayer, supplication to gods too
immediate and too removed.
Similarly,
the production uses a variety of objects and inventions to give imaginative
reality to the story. There is the dance of Oedipus with an iron-spoked wheel,
an image of the great wheel of fortune. There is his engagement with a hook on
a beam, trying to hold fast with his cane to a heaven he cannot attain, or the
application of blood from a small vial to represent tearing out his eyes.
Tiresias (Margaretta Lantz) is shown to us in all his broken age with nothing more
than the crouch beneath a blanket.
The
production is filled with imagination and confident expression, all predicated
on the power of theatrical immediacy, the confluence of audience and actor in
the moment of live performance. The company is talented, balanced, disciplined
and passionate, the artistry mature and substantial.
I
thought this production was thrilling, admirable and utterly engaging. There
was nothing stuffy or pedantic about this ancient classic, and the combination
of a beautiful translation of a truly great story with inventive, committed
performers made this one of the best shows I've seen in months. Bravo to
Akropolis Performance Lab.