No doubt the ancient Greeks had something we might call a culture, as did the Persians, Egyptians and Phoenicians. An Appalachian quilt, a plate of spaghetti or a vase is created according to values, principles and traditions; these cannot be proven or disproven. Culture is irrational. To maintain a culture you have to guard it, fight off outside influences that might taint its purity and attack whomever and whatever threatens its pristine force. But the Greek artists, and their followers through the centuries, never needed to avoid the taint of foreign contact. Instead of being committed to promulgating cultural values, principles and traditions, Greek art sought truth – the telling of things as they are. Thus, the Greek philosophers and artists whose names and works have come down to us were the enemies of culture, the liberators of the individual mind from the irrational tyranny of culture.
While the epics of Roland or Gilgamesh extol the warrior virtues of their sentimental heroes, the Greek Iliad is about a warrior who refuses to fight. It neither denies the glory of the warrior tradition nor shrinks from demonstrating the cruelty and suffering caused by it. The classics purely show by means of artistic metaphor how life is – beautiful, painful, glorious, shameful, lonely, joyful, sad.
One of the more astute spiritual children of Homer was the Athenian playwright Sophocles, who took a barbaric myth about a man who kills his father and sleeps with his mother and turned it into a play called Oedipus Rex, about a man searching for the cause to the suffering in the city he rules, only to discover that he is the cause.
In turn, one of Sophocles’ locally astute spiritual children, Rita Dove, America’s former poet laureate, has drawn inspiration from the Sophocles tragedy to create The Darker Face of the Earth, which recently ended its run at Piedmont Virginia Community College under the able direction of Teresa Dowell-Vest, who is quite astute herself.
A white plantation owner in antebellum South Carolina has found herself pregnant by one of her slaves. The child is secreted away to be sold and raised in bondage and by chance is bought by his mother 20 years later. Neither he nor the woman nor his father knows the truth of his origin. Augustus, the prodigal slave, plans a revolt and begins an affair with his mother (not knowing she’s his mother) and of course he is doomed, as are they all.
Borrowing from history but not trapped in anemic historicism, Dove manages to create a plantation which feels organically possible and dramatically flexible, yet is cut loose from the sentimental Gone With the Wind conventions. This alone is a magnificent achievement. But the play has other strengths as well – great ones. A soaring spirit, a defiant anti-sentimentality and an effective mix of humor and brutality are but a few. The acting is committed and energetic, although there is the constant amateur mistake of energy displaced by actors shifting on their feet and, at times, awkwardness with cues and transitions. Lighting and scene design are effective, by Larry Hugo and William T. Hurd, respectively. And Dorothy Smith‘s costumes were excellent – particularly her rag-tag revolutionary army (though the coachman’s sweat pants weren’t quite disguised enough).
Darker Face feels unfinished in some respects. The hoodoo woman’s cabin scenes are essential and played well but don’t quite work, and the subtheme of the Haitian revolt would be more effective if the slaves were asking Augustus to give them information about something they had already heard rumors about. But these are tactical details. The overarching problem with Darker Face is not Dove’s failings but theater’s.
Watching this play, one realizes how far modern theater is from possessing effective storytelling techniques. To tell a story truthfully, you have to believe there is a truth to tell. Yet, belief in and respect for culture allows for no individual truth except personal feelings. The lyric mode, that is, the expression of personal feelings, gives individuals some breathing room within the monolith of culture, but even that isn’t enough. The lyric form is an appropriate vehicle for characters who are trying to make meaningful lives within the culture of slavery, but it doesn’t work if the task is to give expression to those who refuse to respect culture.
Rita Dove is by profession a poet of lyric expression, and an extremely good one. Lyric poetry is practically the only poetry America has these days, possibly the only poetry America has ever had. For those attuned to lyricism – the expansion and contemplation of personal experience – everything I’ve just said is untrue, and you should find Darker Face effective from beginning to end. But many of us need rhythmic variation in two hours of theater as we would in two hours of music. Darker Face‘s lyricism is beautiful: lyric speech, lyric songs, lyric movements, lyric staging. But there’s too much of it, or more precisely, not enough of something else.
What that something else is, I don’t know. Other kinds of poetry, certainly. Still, I loved Darker Face of the Earth because it is a threat to the culture of theater, a stubborn unshaped mass of truth defiantly telling us what we don’t know how to do and hinting at what we might be able to do.
Dove has gone to the Greeks with questions and that is an assertion in and of itself that questions are worth asking, that there could be such a thing as truth. The liberating power of the classics is that they don’t give us answers. They offer no irrational value- or tradition-oriented beliefs. They remain for us the liberation from whatever irrational value or tradition is currently imprisoning our minds and souls, because all culture is a prison, and truth is the only way out.