Seattlest Pix 09Nov24
Tuesdays are Muppet Days
Seattle to Remain Famous for Coffee and Rain
Thanksgiving Pairing Suggestion: Dessert Isn't Just a Meal
Mayor-To-Be Schedules Town Halls for Input and Companionship
There's a rotting foot at the heart of The Cure at Troy (through May 3 at the Rep, tickets: $10-$59); you can almost hear Philoctetes's leg oozing as he walks. The stench is described well enough to draw flies to the theatre. And when he loses his mind with pain, screaming about his wound cracking open, blood everywhere, you'd really like to be elsewhere, and maybe less nauseous.
That's the point--there are times it's not easy to stand your ground. On opening night the play's intensity shook people up; they tittered nervously during a show about a war that won't end, an abandoned wounded soldier, and a blowhard senior officer whose motto is "by any means necessary." But their attention never flagged, and not simply for eloquence's sake. The Rep has staged a deadly serious moral dilemma; against the spectacle of larger forces at work, personal betrayals slice away at honor and nobility. What humor there is, is bleak or acid.
The story is that the archer Philoctetes (Boris McGiver, who fully deserves his ovation) got bitten by a snake on the way to the Trojan War; the bite got infected, wouldn't heal, stunk up the ship. The creeped-out crew, led by Odysseus, ditched him on the island Lemnos. Ten years later, the Trojan War has stalled and all the good soothsayers say Philoctetes and his magic bow and arrows (once used by Hercules!) could give the Greeks the edge.
So Odysseus (a cipher of empty efficiency, as played by Hans Altwies) returns with Achilles' son Neoptolemus (Seth Numrich, nicely shading naivete into resolute action) to talk Philoctetes into letting bygones be bygones. A three-man chorus (Guy Adkins, Ben Gonio, Jon Michael Hill) act as crewmen, as disturbing mental voices, and (in three-part harmony) as the voice of the gods. (One of them is also hilariously Look-I-just-work-here as a messenger, but the cast page won't tell us which.)
The play shows its age's style--it's full of aria-like monologues pretending to be dialogues--but poet/playwright Seamus Heaney smuggles in enough poetry to make it worth listening to almost every line (which are recited without end stops as regular speech, sacrificing the rhymes).
Heaney wrote his adaptation of Sophocles' play back in 1990 when the peace movement in Ireland was balanced on another knife edge. He stresses standing up for the right thing--not buckling under to bad orders, or refusing to budge out of wounded pride. Some of his statelier lines don't come off--even that famous conclusion ("Human beings suffer,/They torture one another,/They get hurt and get hard./No poem or play or song/Can fully right a wrong/Inflicted and endured") is not his best stuff--but he knows how to write down dramatic squalls.
McGiver plays Philoctetes's tetchy rages, self-engrossed suffering, and need to be heard to the hilt, almost transcending the lines. (In fact, one little old lady with a walker said to another on the way out, "I couldn't understand some of what he was saying when he was rolling around, but I felt the emotion of it.")
The show opens with the chorus in front of a huge, IMAX-size white screen, which lifts to reveal a transparent scrim, which lifts to reveal the set, but we were most impressed by the anti-spectacle of a pitch-black stage for the arrival on forbidding shores. Director Tina Landau has the cast on the move, acting out their speeches and flashbacks, clambering all over the impressively steep and rocky hillside, complete with volcanic vent, created by designer Blythe Quinlan. Landau lets McGiver stand and deliver his final speech to the audience, which seemed uninventive and out of character for her.
If there's a major misstep, it's the miscast music by Chicago's Josh Schmidt (whom we suspect is not a choral composer) and the half-spoken, half-sung chorus parts. You just have to make your peace with it and not giggle at it, particularly when you hear something rhyme with "abcess."
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
What?
Oh.... oh.... I see how it is.