| On Sunday afternoon as I was driving home
"Le Show" came on the radio and before I could switch the station, host Harry
Shearer began explaining how Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Lay had just sold their winter cottage,
one of several Lay properties, for eight million dollars, the highest price ever exacted
for a piece of Aspen real estate. The address of the cottage, as Harry Shearer said,
"I’m not making this up," was Shady Lane. At the moment of hearing
"Shady Lane," I was drawn to glance at the passing street sign, one of many
signs I’d never bothered to notice along the route, and, I’m not making this up,
the sign read Shady Lane.
In New York this month I was happy to see To You, the Birdie!
(Phedre), being an adaptation of Racine’s Phaedre by the Wooster Group,
and Monster, the Classic Stage Company’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Sound and light were prevalent in both productions, and in the case of Phedre the
sound dominated the acting. Particularly evocative was the sensual lapping of water as
Hippolytos went swimming. Water was also heard in Monster, to unsettling effect,
during the drowning of Victor Frankenstein’s young brother William, sweetly played by
Michael Pitt. Neither Frances McDormand in the role of Phedre’s nurse Oenone nor
Willem Dafoe as Theseus was able to lift Phedre beyond a display of technical
effects, but then I have not been lucky with Willem Dafoe on stage. For the Wooster
Group’s 1997 revival of The Hairy Ape in which Dafoe took the title role, I
could decipher hardly a word of his performance. The fault may have been my seat location,
the acoustics, the crashing technical effects, or Dafoe’s voice and speech
liabilities, but I left in dejection at the intermission and the Wooster Group kindly
refunded my ticket money. Slow speech and hand-held or lavaliere microphones boosted and
made distinct the language of Phedre.
The Wooster Group under-measured the stature of the Phedre
characters. They reduced the Greeks, no doubt intentionally, calling their production
"a soap opera." Set on a badminton court among monitors and cameras, and
plexiglass panels with aluminum tracks, the production looked and felt nothing like a soap
opera but in terms of pointlessness was on a par with a soap opera. I would have to say
that director Elizabeth LeCompte wanted to get a laugh out of Phedre, envisioning her as a
constipated, dependent, pampered woman lusting for the young son of her absent husband.
But Phedre is somewhat more than a bound-up and stuck-up woman. She is a Grecian queen
whose dilemma absorbed the mind of Racine. Having played Phaedra, admittedly at too young
an age, in Boulder, Colorado in a translation by Greek scholar Peter Arnot, I must attest
that Racine’s interest lay in the horrific human pain of being caught, absolutely
possessed, by one’s desire, as Phedre is by her desire for Hippolytus, though she is
Queen. Since the Queen in Greek society is representative of the people, then if the Queen
can succumb to unquenchable, unreasonable, outlandish craving, none of us is immune. When
the Queen falls before the ethical situation, we fall. Her imbalance is ours, but not so
in the Wooster production. In the Wooster production, we are invited to mock Phedre. We
see possession characterized as constipation. We see the problem of desire belonging not
to us but to Phedre alone, a spoiled female regularly in need of a nurse-assisted enema.
We see Frances McDormand as the nurse drown herself in a toilet (rather than throw herself
into the sea) effectively reducing Oenone to how she was treated by Phedre.
Stylistically, the production offers starkly angular movement redolent of Egyptian
statuary (if not Doric Greek), best embodied by Kate Vale as Phedre. But overall, the
acting tends to shrink under a soap opera notion and loud effects. Phedre becomes a
case of sound without fury signifying what, which is not unlike the case of Mr. And Mrs.
Kenneth Lay, a case of rich people’s noise. |
