At Agassiz Seneca's Oedipus

JUST before I went to see Seneca's Oedipus last night, while I was having dinner, I heard about a fire that broke out early yesterday morning in the home of some friends of mine. Everybody made it out safely except for the cat, Porky, who was that rare animal which makes its way through the world with both saintly charity and sparkling good humor. We were very sad, all of us looking down at our plates. It was a small tragedy, perhaps an inversion of the Aristotelian "larger than life" mode, but we were exalted just the same. Until the girl who had cooked the meal started giggling and said "crispy critters." We laughed spastically.

Harpo's production of Oedipus makes a similar statement about the bogus exaltation of human tragedy to cathartic spectacle, wherein great men fall from pinnacles in the all-seeing determinist universe of the Fates. Director Laurence Senelick has chosen the Seneca version over the traditional Sophocles "to remove the play from the realms of both Freudian psychology and aloof neo-classicism." This may also mean that he has chosen a play which, because of its gore and violence, leads to a denial that there is anything more in suffering than suffering; a denial that tragedy can be uplifting in transcending itself. The production calls for a belittling (rather than enlarging) honesty toward human emotions.

There is also the somewhat cliched analog of Nero's Rome to Nixon's America. We must see violence naked of its grandeur. We must, as Senelick says, leave the theatre unable to speak of the metaphysics of a work a tragedy. We must rather allow ourselves to be immersed in the tragedy and violence itself. This is close to Artaud's Theater of Cruclty, and is certainly viable.

Still, Senelick's attempt to demystify Ocdipus sometimes goes beyond honesty and emotional integrity to intellectual eccentricity, even perversity. After an actor has recounted in nauseating detail how Ocdipus has just gouged out his eyes, the chorus begins to laugh, and then say things like "There's good luck and bad luck," or "that's fate, hahaha." In the final scene, after Ocdipus has stumbled blindly across the stage out the door the cast does a copulation mime that features a man with an enormous dildo and a woman with pubic hair drawn on her leotard. It is like the TV show "Shindig," as the chorus groans antiphonally up to a very convincing orgasm. Lights out. That's demystification, allright, but it's also a pretty cheap trick to play on the Oedipus story.

Senclick explains his Oedipus best by calling it a ritual. It is somewhat like Shakesepare's The Winter's Tale as a celebration of natural harmony and order, and an acceptance of human imperfection. Senclick at times seems possessed by these imperfections.

The forms Senelick has chosen to convey ritual are highly derivative: he has borrowed Oriental Kabuki gestures for Oedipus and locasta, and this works very well, stylizing their "act" of semi-divinity almost to satire. For the Chorus he has assimilated the chanting and stick-beating rhythms of the Open Theater, the serpentine body piles of the Living Theater, and the copulation mime of Marat/Sade. All are dramatically sound, but one is aware of their unoriginality.

Despite its plea for uncomplicated emotions, this is a lavish production. Senclick clearly has a vision of the theater that has matured to the point of developing contradictions and he has wisely allowed them to stand unresolved. As locasto says, "Truth is not human. It has no mercy."

Seneca's Oedpius is an exciting and challenging production. Much of the acting is very good. Shcila Hart as Iocasta and Jack Shea as Tiresias are particularly strong. Wakeen Ray-Riv's choreography is superb, and exploits the extremely-limited Agassiz stage to the fullest. Senclick's direction is intentionally upsetting. Yet it must be admitted that even a ritualized Theater of Cruclty cannot escape being theater. And as long as that is true, I prefer Sophocles's pretension to human reality to Seneca's.