From nauplion@charm.net Sun Oct 1 19:42:12 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id TAA94934 for ; Sun, 1 Oct 2000 19:42:11 -0700 Received: from fellspt.charm.net (root@fellspt.charm.net [199.0.70.29]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id TAA12448 for ; Sun, 1 Oct 2000 19:42:10 -0700 Received: from charm.net (coretel-116-202.charm.net [209.143.116.202]) by fellspt.charm.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA13151 for ; Sun, 1 Oct 2000 22:42:01 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <39D7F550.7BC1E7FB@charm.net> Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 22:39:18 -0400 From: Diana Wright X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-DIAL (Win95; U) X-Accept-Language: en,el,tr MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Classics Subject: NY Times -- Oedipus Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit This morning EJTh commented on the NYTimes column on Oedipus. I thought there might be a few out there who haven't been able to read the article. This production will be playing in NYC this coming week. DW Thoughts on the Perfect Play in Rome's Colosseum By ESTELLE PARSONS THE moment for "Oedipus Rex" has come round again. It popped up on Broadway in the late 1940's, when I, an eager student, saw the most acclaimed actor on the English-speaking stage, Laurence Olivier, portray the hapless young man who solves the riddle of the Sphinx, is rewarded with a kingdom and a queen, attempts to rid his land of a plague and discovers the truth. It is one of the greatest plays ever written, certainly on the short list and close to first prize. What it says about our great American lack of culture — and just plain lack of common sense — that it has taken a large part of my lifetime for a major production to come to New York, I, as an American theater person, don't even want to know. Now, the National Theater of Greece is bringing "Oedipus Rex" to City Center, beginning Wednesday for — my gosh — six whole performances, through next Sunday. As it happens, I am privileged to be directing the play myself in another production, having been nudged into that position by — once again — one of the most acclaimed actors in the English-speaking world, Al Pacino. I share with him longevity at the Actors' Studio, where we developed our version over six months. (We expect to surface this season in New York in a commercial production under the auspices of Robert Fox when we find the right performance space.) There were a number of actors who worked with us early on because we were double and triple cast, so that people could grow with the play and still do their mainstream gigs. But only one of these actors had played in "Oedipus" before, and that was a college production. Am I going to name all the leading actors who came together because of this great play and to be with one another? No. These thoughts are about "Oedipus Rex," the National Theater of Greece and directing, not celebrity. So, it was not by chance that I found myself in Rome this summer, the very July week that the National Theater of Greece opened "Oedipus Rex" in, of all places, the Colosseum. Lee Strasberg used to say, "If you see something you can use when you go to the theater, steal it," and that was precisely why I found myself climbing the crumbling gravel, marble and cement steps to my seat in the dusk of a gorgeous Roman evening. That afternoon, at the Villa Borghese, I had studied the famous fourth century A.D. mosaics depicting gladiators fighting one another and wild animals, with some gladiators dead at their feet in the very Colosseum in which I now found myself. As I reached my seat, a profound sense of violence and trepidation seized my heart. It struck me as the exact opposite of the expectations one has upon entering a theater. My knee-jerk reaction to the words "Greek tragedy" is: a large, white-robed, swaying Chorus; masks, declamation always perilously close to singing but a lot closer to shrieking. So my journey directing "Oedipus Rex" in New York started on a negative note. Still, collaboration is the name of my game. We burrowed together into the heart of the play and eventually arrived at what we had some confidence would be an absorbing and moving performance on an indoor stage somewhat smaller than that of a Broadway house. By contrast, the National Theater of Greece's production of "Oedipus Rex" was for big audiences in big spaces. Not only were they playing in the Colosseum in Rome; they would later perform in the ancient theater at Epidaurus in Greece, which can accommodate 14,000 spectators. What a homecoming for these stalwart Greek actors. We in America have no theater to come home to. The Group Theater, the most meaningful and original company in American theater, bounced from site to site and disappeared into thin air after 10 years. The Steppenwolf Theater Company has just celebrated 25 years in its Chicago home. How many thousands of years does Greek drama go back? Obviously their "Oedipus Rex" is going to be different from ours. But as I looked down toward the stage I wondered: Is there something I can learn or steal? The set, which occupied about one quarter of the vast Colosseum, consisted of a long walkway crossed by a platform on and around which were 44 George Segal-like figures in modern dress. Aha, I thought, it is the director's idea of the Chorus. This is a production of a director's concept. It is going to be very different from ours. The director, Vassilis Papavassileiou, an award-winner in early middle age, intense, intellectual and unpretentious, told me he began making notes for a production of "Oedipus Rex" five years ago, when he was directing Sophocles' "Ajax" and became intrigued with the idea of the hero who goes mad. He has done his own translation into modern Greek: it includes some ancient Greek and some slang for shock value. (In New York, there will be English super titles.) Mr. Papavassileiou believes that Sophocles in "Oedipus Rex" was interested in political power and leadership and concerned with the political problems of his own time in Athens (the play is presumed to have been written about 429 B.C.), rather than the time of the myth. On the surface, of course, the myth tells the story of Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father, the king of Thebes, then marries the king's widow, Jocasta, who is his mother, and with whom he has four children. When the plague strikes Thebes, Oedipus sends Jocasta's brother, Creon, to the oracle at Delphi for advice. The oracle says the former king's murderer is polluting Thebes. Though the blind prophet Teiresias tells him that he is the killer, Oedipus does not believe him. It is not until two shepherds reveal the truth that Oedipus blinds himself. In the opinion of Mr. Papavassileiou, it follows that Oedipus represents personal power and Creon represents the power of the state: a combination of people's power and the power of leadership. Rule by the people is always an illusion, Mr. Papavassileiou said. The people can never rule; the power has to reside in a leader. The lack of leadership, when it occurs in the play, creates a vacuum, which causes a response in the Chorus. It is the director wrestling with these issues that informs this production dramatically and visually. Can I articulate what our production is about? No. I will just have to wait for the critics to tell us. And they will. For me, that is the time for knowing. I fear that an intellectual concept before I start working on a play either as director or actor may limit, subconsciously even, the depth of what I can find. I am not Greek with a Greek classic in my bones. My experience as a director has been mostly with Shakespeare and now Sophocles, and I come to both with far more questions than either the Brits or the Greeks. I am aware that the way I like to work doesn't suit some people, just as the ways some people work don't suit me. Isn't it glorious that we all have the opportunity to flourish in the theater? We are censored only by our own inhibitions and audience pressure. "I have been preparing all my life for this part," Grigoris Valtinos, who plays Oedipus, told me in Rome. "It is the ultimate play." Mr. Valtinos started his career in Tennessee Williams's "Sweet Bird of Youth" with Melina Mercouri. In Mr. Papavassileiou's production, the acting choices belong to the director. For example, Tzeni Gaitanopoulou, a founder and leading actress of the Theater of Cyprus, who describes herself as uncompromising in her choice of roles, had played Jocasta as "totally female" in a previous production. For this one, Mr. Papavassileiou asked her to "assume a power stance" when Jocasta realizes that Oedipus is going mad. For Ms. Gaitanopoulou, this is "another side" of Jocasta. And she is playing it that way out of her respect for Mr. Papavassileiou's vision. It got me thinking about the pride we actors feel when we can give directors what they want. Our modern theater is mostly about directors' concepts. In the exploration we did at the Actors' Studio, I wanted something different — a creative collaboration with the actors. I am interested in exploring the actors' creativity, most particularly when the characters are of mythic proportion. If they were going to arouse the audience in the way I was hoping, they needed a deep belief in their creations. For me, it works. THE music for this "Oedipus Rex" is original. So is ours. Interestingly, the movement of its rhythms and its intensity is not so different, particularly in an abrupt change of idiom just before Oedipus discovers the truth. I had been insecure about our choices when the play begins to get wilder and broader in its style, when Oedipus starts to realize that everything he thought was true is not. I knew what I thought it should be, but I lacked a little confidence in my ideas. On this musical abruptness, we were right. I mean the modern Greeks and I agreed. I really mean that their composer and ours were in harmony. A "perfect" play could not be all on one note, could it? And yet when Sophocles spreads his wings, I went for it timidly, while the Greeks stepped right up to the plate. We're stealing that! In performances of tragedies, a sense of humor often seems to be surgically removed. "Oedipus Rex" wouldn't be a perfect play without a sense of humor. It is possible that I mean irony. When an old shepherd shows up in court before the king and tells the king who he is — mind you, an old shepherd knows more about the king than the king knows about himself — and another old shepherd lurches in with the king's fate in his hands: what could be more delicious and satisfying? Mr. Papavassileiou calls it "a parody of tragedy within a tragedy." I'm going to steal some of the humor in there, but I'm not sure just how I can do that, darn it. The costuming for the Greek production is eclectic. The static figures are augmented by a live Chorus of 10, and all are in modern casual dress. The royalty are in Elizabethan attire. Teiresias is in white robes. He is also otherworldly. He arrives in a wheelchair with his boy guide in his lap. Our Teiresias stumbles in from where? Somewhere earthy, somewhere primitive, or maybe from a seat in the audience, from which he has been watching the proceedings. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the two actors portraying Oedipus and Teiresias are playing this long and difficult scene intelligently. To get back to the costumes: the live chorus and royalty from time to time are in ubiquitous long coats with pockets. The thought is that they thrust the actors into contemporary physical behavior. Interesting. Our dress is dark to reflect the faces, where almost all of the play happens. This is what Jane Greenwood, our costume designer, said. Actually, it is in the faces where we moderns, Greeks and Americans, come together. For both of us, there are no masks. THE director, knowing nothing of what we were up to, said that if he were doing it for a more intimate theater, he would concentrate on the dramatic situation and the relationships more, but a big production has to rest almost exclusively on the words. If I were to do it in a large space for larger audiences, I would consider myself fortunate to mount a production as exciting as this one. We are at opposite ends of the spectrum in two ways: audience response to a large production will always be different from the response to a chamber piece. Secondly, Mr. Papavassileiou believes in directing, and I believe in collaborating. You, dear reader, must see both performances because you will never in your life forget "Oedipus Rex" in these incarnations. Estelle Parsons, the artistic director of the Actors' Studio, will appear in November in the Signature Theater Company's production of ``The Last of the Thorntons'' by Horton Foote. .