How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken
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And yet the costumes may have been the only thing that did fully convey the larger, political aspect of the Oedipus drama—the sense, one that Sophocles goes to great lengths to underscore, that the terrible things happening are not merely happening to a private person but to the leader of a city, one that he himself had once rescued and one indeed that has turned to him for salvation once again. Suzuki has commented not only on the similarities between tragedy and Noh, but on what he sees as the differences:
Noh focuses on the vanity of human passions seen under the spectrum of eternity, whereas Greek tragedy stresses the indefatigable power of the human spirit in fighting against fate. Even though the fight is destined to be lost, Greek heroes overwhelm us with their will to know the whole truth about their failure…. Oedipus is the representative case—with all the sinister premonitions, he pursues his own past sins like the severest of prosecutors.
There is no question that what is admirable in Sophocles’ Oedipus is his heroic desire to know even when it is clear that the knowledge he seeks will bring disaster. But “indefatigable power of the human spirit” sounds suspiciously sentimental, and if there is anything that distinguishes the classical sensibility from the contemporary it is the former’s almost total lack of sentimentality.
This is nowhere truer than in tragedy, a genre that draws our attention as unrelentingly to its protagonists’ deficiencies of character as to the piteousness of the punishments that in some sense “correct” those deficiencies. Indeed the text that Sophocles has composed suggests over and over again that what Oedipus is fighting against is as much his own nature as some randomly hostile fate. (At least one aspect of Oedipus’s nature that clearly ought to arouse suspicion is one that Suzuki’s style of direction nicely underscores: those explosive rages against older men—indeed, against every other male character in the play. Classicists like to observe that Oedipus doesn’t have an Oedipus complex, but it would be hard to find a character who has bigger “issues” about older male authority figures than this one.) And yet even despite the care with which Sophocles limns his protagonist’s character, Oedipus is much more than simply a heroic individual, tormented by psychological demons against which he struggles alone, valiantly, in his quest for knowledge. The grandeur and horror of Oedipus’s position owes much to the fact that the acts he commits as an ostensibly private person—or at least within what we’d think of as the private sphere (he has serious problems with road rage; he marries an older woman)—have terrible public ramifications: there is, after all, a plague going on that’s afflicting all of Thebes, and Oedipus and his past crimes are the reason why.
It is Oedipus’s public role that Sophocles emphasizes throughout the play, particularly at the beginning. The curtain, so to speak, rises to reveal him surrounded by supplicatory priests and citizens, appealing to the killer of the Sphinx to find once again a solution to a civic crisis—the plague. The next scene, an exchange with his brother-in-law Creon, demonstrates the ruler’s anxious concern for his people. (In the prologue, Oedipus assures the priest that he has already sent to Delphi for a clue about what’s causing the plague; Creon’s entrance, as he returns from his mission, is a concrete demonstration of the truth of his claim.) When it is revealed that the plague is a divine scourge in response to the presence among the Thebans of the old king’s murderer, it is Oedipus the ruler—Oedipus tyrannos, Oedipus rex—who lays the famous curse on the killer, “whoever he or they may be”—unaware all the while that he is condemning himself.
All this has been stripped away from Suzuki’s Oedipus: the prologue supplication, the Creon scene (he appears here only for what, in Sophocles, is his second scene with Oedipus), anything that gives a sense of Oedipus the public personage fulfilling his responsibilities to a people and a city—and, hence, anything that conflicts with Suzuki’s notion of Oedipus as a type of romantic sufferer. Most bizarrely of all, Suzuki’s version of the play ends immediately after the moment of revelation, when Oedipus realizes who he is. Everything in Sophocles’ play that follows that revelation—the messenger’s speech with its narrative of the self-blinding and of the discovery of Jocasta’s suicide, the reappearance of Oedipus at the end, abjectly bidding farewell to his two daughters, his climactic exit to begin a life of exile—was relegated to a two-minute summary delivered via loudspeaker. By chopping off Sophocles’ beginning and, particularly, the ending (for it is the traumatic ending that shows us the fulfillment of the opening curse in the abjection of the man, and thus brings the drama full circle), Suzuki diminishes the public, political, and cosmic dimensions of the play, and thereby erodes the sense that what happens in the drama is the result of very great forces at work in the universe, inexorably effecting their terrible outcomes.
But that larger dimension is what raises the stakes and makes tragedy precisely what Suzuki thinks it is not: a cosmic drama about the vanity of human action. What brings Oedipus closer to the “spectrum of eternity”—what makes him worth the Greek gods’ notice at all—is the fact that he is not a private person but is, and has been all along, royal, destined to rule the fates of others. Sophocles, of course, did not call his play what Suzuki called it for the purposes of this production—Oedipus Rex, which is merely the Latin translation of the title that an ancient editor, who’d cottoned on to how many times the epithet occurs in the play, gave it: Oedipus tyrannos, “Oedipus the supreme ruler of the city-state.” But whatever its author called it, and however this director envisioned it, this is a work that is clearly about a man who is a ruler as well as an individual—a work about states, and states of being, as well as personalities. As admirable as it was in so many respects, Suzuki’s production gave you the Oedipus, but not the rex.
For that—for the grand sense of the larger social, civic, political, and cosmic concerns that tragedy in its original context so fiercely and stylishly illuminated—you had to get very far from Athens, and go to Brooklyn.
II
How relevant to contemporary events should a classical Greek tragedy be? According to the classical Greeks, not too much so. We know that early in the genre’s evolution, there were plays that treated “real life” subjects—stories that were, at the time, recent news. The Capture of Miletus by Phrynichus, produced in 492 B.C., was a harrowingly emotional depiction of the Persians’ destruction of a Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor—one of the proximate causes of the Persian Wars, which Herotodus would so memorably record; twenty years later, Aeschylus would famously dramatize the Greeks’ rout of the Persian navy, a victory that had taken place only eight years earlier and which, indeed, marked the end of the Persian conflict.
But for the most part, the Athenian dramatists embraced, exclusively as far as we can tell, another, subtler kind of “relevance,” one that was at once more abstract and more enduring than that afforded by detailed allusions to current events. Tragedy was much more interested in vigorously exploiting the rich cultural vein of myth for its plots; these stories, about a relatively small number of divine and human families, could remind audiences of “calamities of their very own” (the phrase Herotodus used to describe the reasons that The Capture of Miletus affected its Athenian audience so deeply) without being mired in the kind of real-life particulars that could cloud aesthetic experience (and that would, in any case, be doomed to a relatively short cultural shelf life). Even when comment on current events warranted a response from what we today would call “the creative community,” it was myth that provided the ideal armature. As witness, for instance, the well-known example of Euripides’ Trojan Women, produced in the spring of 415 B.C., which uses the final, ugly chapter of the Trojan saga to indict Athens’s ruthless annihilation of an unwilling “ally” the previous winter.
The shift from history to myth as a subject for drama was, perhaps, the first and greatest example of tragedy’s special genius for abstraction and distillation—qualities that made it the artistic vehicle par excellence for examining, sometimes critically, the institutions of life
in the polis, the city-state. The failure of many productions of Greek tragedy—and of two recent stagings in particular, one of Euripides’ final “war play,” Iphigenia at Aulis, another of Sophocles’ great masterpiece Oedipus Rex—to reproduce or even suggest the larger, more abstract, more public concerns that were integral to Athenian drama in its heyday was the subject of a previous essay. That failure, which is owing in part to the contemporary, post-Freudian preference for psychology over politics as the subject of drama, inevitably miniaturizes and misrepresents Greek tragedy. All the more ironic, therefore, that of a number of recent productions of Greek tragic texts to appear in New York, it was the one about what we think of as the most private issues—love, sex, marriage—that came closest to conveying how Athenian drama, with its grand public preoccupations, must have felt, and worked.
The work in question was a new theater piece by the playwright Charles Mee, entitled Big Love, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. BAM’s publicity material for Big Love states that it’s based on Aeschylus’ Suppliant Maidens, one of the seven extant plays by that poet, but that doesn’t do justice to the scope (some might say audacity) of what Mee has done. Many of Mee’s earlier plays are dramatic Humpty Dumptys—reassembled (as he has put it) out of the deconstructed shards of preexisting works, among them A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Elaine Scarry’s writings, the transcript of the Menendez trials, and of course various Greek tragedies. (Another play, called True Love, updates Euripides’ Hippolytus to a gas station in upstate New York.) But the putting-together-again you get in Big Love is more impressive than any of those could ever be, since Mee’s play in fact reconstitutes all of the action thought to have been dramatized in Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy, which had its première sometime around 463 B.C.—about five years before the Oresteia and seven before the dramatist’s death—and of which Suppliant Maidens was the first, and only surviving, third. (The trilogy’s plot we infer from later summaries and some fragments, of which the most significant is seven lines thought to be from the final play.)
Like so much of high classical tragedy, this lost trilogy entwines what we today would think of as the personal and the political in such a way as to make them inextricable. As far as it’s possible to reconstruct it, the trilogy went something like this. In the first play, Suppliant Maidens, the eponymous chorus, the fifty daughters of Danaus, an Egyptian king and descendant of the Greek princess Io, arrive in Io’s hometown of Argos, having fled Egypt and their fifty cousins, to whom they’ve been promised in marriage. Whatever their assertions that the first-cousin betrothals are “unlawful”—difficult to take at face value, given that (as the Greeks knew) even brother–sister incest didn’t raise eyebrows in Egypt—Aeschylus makes it clear that what really motivates the girls’ flight is their profound aversion to sex, and to the very idea of marriage. The fifty girls supplicate their distant relation the Argive king, Pelasgus, who after consulting with his assembly—every tragic supplication, however intimate the reasons, precipitates a political crisis—nobly agrees to defend the girls. (Their threat of mass suicide at the holy altar, a terrible pollution, helps him to see the light.) The beastly cousins eventually arrive in hot pursuit, threatening war against Argos and testing the resolve of Pelasgus, who tells off their representative in no uncertain terms. The play ends with this tense standoff.
The next play in the trilogy, Egyptians, seems to have begun with the defeat of Pelasgus and his army by the Egyptians after a pitched battle; in his place, the steely and ambitious Danaus, father of the fleeing girls, assumes the throne. It is he who makes his daughters swear their famous oath to kill their husbands on their wedding night—which at the climax of this middle play they all do, with the exception of one girl, Hypermnestra, who has fallen in love with her betrothed. End of part two. The third play, Danaids, apparently portrayed the moral, legal, and political fallout of Hypermnestra’s actions. In it, Hypermnestra is tried for breaking her oath, but acquitted by none other than Aphrodite herself, goddess of love, who (in that seven-line fragment) affirms the universal and inevitable power of love and sex—the very things that the cousins had neurotically shunned, and that Hypermnestra alone embraced. Just as the Oresteia ends with a delicately achieved equilibrium between the craving for retribution and the necessity of peace, so too the Danaid trilogy, which even as it gives voice to female terror of male aggression, reasserts the need for marriage, reproduction, and the social structures that further them.
At first glance, the stage of the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is where Big Love was performed late last year, didn’t look as if anything very dramatic were going to happen on it, let alone attempted rape, mass murder, and a climactic courtroom drama. What you saw, basically, was a bathtub and a chandelier. This was not necessarily what you’d expect in a production of a drama that the classicist Froma Zeitlin, in an article about the Danaid trilogy, described as one that “confronts the most primary questions about relations between the sexes,” and that the French scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant called above all “an inquiry into the true nature of kratos”—that is, of power. According to Vernant, the play raises questions that typically entwine the domestic and the political: “What is authority, the authority of the man over the woman, of husband over wife, of the head of the State over all his fellow citizens, of the city over the foreigner and the metic [resident alien], of the gods over mortal men?” Power, gender, marriage, politics, religion—all this in a bathtub?
Well, yes. Mee understands that tragedy’s genius is for abstracting big ideas from concentrated resources; what, after all, did you really get in Athens but a few actors, a handful of stylized gestures and dance movements, highly conventional poetic speech, a door upstage center that conveniently stood for a palace, a hut, a city, a temple, a tomb? His stage directions alone show a remarkable grasp of this all-important notion: “The setting for the piece should not be real, or naturalistic. It should not be a set for the piece to play within but rather something against which the piece can resonate.” And resonate it did: Mee created new harmonies by weaving into the mythic plot sounds and images and movement and artifacts—acrobatics, tomato-throwing, dance, tons of music ranging from Le nozze di Figaro to the blues song “You Don’t Own Me,” some business about Estée Lauder 24 Karat Color Golden Body Crème with Sunbloc—familiar from the contemporary culture.
The plot was basically Aeschylus’s. Here again, there are fifty girls in flight from an unwanted marriage, and fifty brothers in pursuit—although we actually only meet three of each (Lydia, Olympia, Thyona; Nikos, Oed, Constantine), a nice concession on Mee’s part to the contemporary discomfort with choruses, yet one that preserves the corporate character of Aeschylus’s choral protagonist. In Mee’s play, the girls are fleeing not to Argos but to a posh hotel in Italy (“If Emanuel Ungaro had a villa on the west coast of Italy, this would be it,” go the stage directions), but as in Suppliant Maidens there’s a supplication to a kindly protector, this time a suave tycoon named Piero instead of a king called Pelasgus, and a threat of mass suicide. Interestingly, the one major cut that Mee has made is to excise the character of the scheming father, Danaus; in this Danaid trilogy, the girls’ hearts don’t belong to Daddy.
It’s at this point, rightly about a third of the way through, that the rest of Aeschylus’s lost trilogy kicks in: you get the murderous oath, and the graphic wedding-night murder (with the exception of the one sister, Lydia, who’s fallen in love with her intended, Nikos), and a furious confrontation between Lydia and her outraged sisters. Of the latter, none is more outraged than the hot-tempered redhead Thyona, who here embodies the sexual anxiety and hatred of men you find in Aeschylus’s text (“These men should be snuffed out! Who needs a man?”) much as her opposite number, Constantine, embodies masculine violence and sexual aggressiveness, with a Bret Easton Ellis twist. “You want me to sew your legs to the bed and pour gasoline on you,” Constantine screams at one point. “Is that what I have to do to keep you?”