stage
Despite its status as an archetypal Western tragedy, Sophocles’ tale of revealed parricide and incest still poses the problems that vex all Greek drama in modern production: the handling of the chorus, the question of music, the long and sometimes stilted-sounding exchanges of single lines (stichomythia). UVA director Betsy Tucker and her cast of undergraduates and MFA candidates meet these challenges with general success, aided by
the lucid recent translation by Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff.
Greek tragedy is partly a song-and-dance act, but its original balletic and musical details are largely unknown. This staging presents the choral odes as a mixture of nonmelodic unison chanting and lines spoken by individual choristers. The overall effect is a clear and moving expression of civic feeling, despite the sometimes distracting choreography. (Greek choruses certainly danced, but probably did not roll on the ground and kick their legs in the air.) Matt Wyatt’s selective musical accompaniment, performed from a gallery on various instruments, adds atmosphere and emphasis but does not serve as a score for the lyrics.
 The UVA Drama Department’s production of Oedipus Tyrannus is proof that ignorance is bliss. Lovely, nonhomicidal, nonincestuous bliss. |
The merits of the Meineck-Woodruff rendering are especially evident in the dialogue among the characters, spoken with a precision that tempers the rhetoric of Sophocles’ text by complementing rather than fighting it. The rich-voiced Will Gatlin portrays Oedipus as a vigorous and overconfident young ruler whose defensive anger yields gradually to an unflinching determination to know the truth. In a pleasing economy of resources, other parts are taken by members of the chorus who discreetly leave the stage and return in costumes that distinguish them from their sexless, anonymous choral roles. J. Hernandez is particularly effective as the cantankerous blind seer Tiresias, racked with an all-too-infallible knowledge of past and future.
Inexplicably, a portion of Tiresias’ longest speech (lines 408-428 in the original) is delivered in Spanish—a choice perhaps prompted by a wish to veil the information it contains, and no doubt facilitated by the availability of a bilingual actor. But premature disclosure is an element of the poet’s technique here, emphasizing Oedipus’ blindness to what the audience already sees. The linguistic stunt contributes nothing but mystification and misrepresents the passage as written: in pure Attic Greek, like the other nonlyric parts of the play.