I'm taking an extended-weekend vacation with the Clarinatrix from Friday to Tuesday, but before I go: a quick note about two shows you should catch. First, the Wooster Group test-drives its video-remix/reconstruction of Richard Burton's 1964 filmed performance of Hamlet at St. Ann's Warehouse. I previewed/blogged it here. If you know the Group's work, you will be amazed by how much of the original this version retains, and what a spirit of, well, reverence seems to pervade it, despite the techno-ironic framing device. The fleet-footed, versatile cast--Scott Shepherd, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos, Roy Faudree and Casey Spooner, principally--handles the verse with force, humor and clarity, but more, they brilliantly execute the painstaking choreography that director Elizabeth LeCompte has fashioned for them: shudders, twitches and repeated movements that reflect the manipulated video image of the Burton film projected behind them. This is a Hamlet that dramatizes, in a way no other version I've seen has, concepts of: ghostliness, haunting, transmutation, transference, loss of self, loss of center, loss of the father, loss of place. When it comes to the Public Theater in late October, it should be an even hotter ticket, buoyed on waves of publicity and hype. So catch it now.
David Johnston's semi-camp, semi-parody, semi-faithful The Oresteia utterly delighted me. At 2hrs and 15mins, it's a smartly condensed retelling of Aeschylus's Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and Eumenides. It's modernized in language and seriocomic affect, but the costumes and settings retain the feel of ancient Greek (or at least a pointedly cheesy facsimile of received Hollywood notions of ancient Greece). For some, this might seem nothing more than a pop-culture trivialization of sacred tragic texts, but I applaud Johnston for replacing the polytheistic, caste-based rituals of the Greeks with psychoanalytical structures and horror-movie tropes. The themes are still the same: the tragic thirst for justice, to do what's right. More, Johnston's dialog is witty and brisk, he knows how to trim the fat from the originals for maximum narrative drive and I'm simply in awe of his control of tone. He can have you snickering one minute over his characters' anachronistic vocabulary and attitudes, then gasping with fear over their fates or marveling over the intensity and depth of feeling that wells up without warning. Plus this is the only version of a Greek tragedy I've seen (although Zeus knows I don't see many of them) that really felt like it was speaking to this historical moment. The fact that all the (superb) actors are dressed in Attic tunics and sandals only adds a frisson of historicity and cultural absurdity to the whole enterprise.
So there you are: revenge tragedies remixed for today's icon-deconstructing, media-saturated, morally relativistic world.
Thanks for your review of the Oresteia--I agree, it was great, and I saw it after vowing never to see another. I have seen The Greeks in various incarnations over thirteen times in my career--they're like some kind of friendship loyalty test among actors--and never once been anything but deadly bored--one time I even made an entire pack of cards out of two programs and played solitaire (I'm not proud of it). I don't understand why people are so committed to doing the tragedies, but no one ever does the comedies. My first professional show was a production of Lysistrata, and the audience loved it. The Greek tragedies are like the most sordid of reality TV--it should be impossible to tear your eyes away.
Never have I seen a company accomplish this until now. Thanks for mentioning it, it's really quite a feat.
Posted by: Molly | March 12, 2007 at 10:05 PM