Tag: Greek tragedy in modern theater

Review | All My Sons by Arthur Miller | Starring Alec Baldwin and Laurie Metcalf | Directed by Stephen Hamilton | Guild Hall, Southampton, Long Island

On June 26, 2015

I love it when, looking over the set before the play begins one sees onstage a house with wood shingles, small town or rural, with a porch and a yard and the suggestion of a lived in interior.

Picnic, The Fifth of July, August: Osage County, All My Sons are some of them. It raises a pleasant nostalgia and eases loneliness – one’s going to meet the family! One does, and with it the dramatic tensions and hidden truths behind the appealing setting.

Set in August 1946, shortly after the end of World War II (and first produced in 1947), All My Sons takes place in and around the porch and yard of Joe Keller, a successful small town manufacturer, and his wife Kate. Their son Larry, a WWII pilot, is MIA and presumed to have died in action, though Kate vehemently refuses to believe he is dead.

Their other son, Chris, has now fallen in love with Ann Deever who’d been Larry’s girlfriend, and when she arrives at the house for a visit, Kate, certain that Larry’s still alive, finds their romance disloyal and unbearable. To make it worse, Ann’s also the daughter of Joe’s former partner, Steve Deever. Joe and Steve had been tried for shipping from their factory mis-manufacturered cracked aircraft cylinder heads for P-40 planes during the war but Joe was exonerated (he was said to be home with the flu the day the parts went out) while his partner, Deever, went to jail, where he still sits. To knowingly send out faulty engine parts is so horrible that neither Ann nor her brother George have so much as written their father since he went to jail.

Only, we learn, that George Deever, now a lawyer, has just paid his father a visit in jail. And that, and other hints, make the Keller’s – and us – realize that, amidst the refreshing grape juice and romance and Joe’s plans for a great dinner out that night, that matter of guilt with the cracked airplane parts simply will not disappear, in spite of the Kellers’ desperate attempt to bury it in the past.

Consider what’s at stake. Larry Keller was a pilot presumed to have died in a combat mission. If Joe had a part in letting the faulty aircraft parts out of the factory, he would, essentially, be responsible for his own son’s death – a thought beyond bearing. And as we begin to consider that possibility, we realize that Kate’s insistence that her son is still alive isn’t just a mother’s grief-driven craziness – for Larry to be alive is her husband’s only hope.

And as things turn out, it is a thought beyond bearing.

It’s not for nothing that Arthur Miller have Joe’s factory manufacturing parts for the P-40 because it was considered our best fighter plane available in large numbers – in other words, there was a rush on them and so, when some of the cylinder heads came through the manufacturing process with a small crack, Joe was frantic to fulfill his quotas and, as he says, not lose his contract, and so he sent out the faulty parts with an ineffective patch. For Miller, this decent man’s tragedy is a compound of personality, capitalism and war. They way the author gives full due to each of these elements is part of the greatness of the play.

The play is not perfect – there are a few implausibilities – but it’s powerful and compelling. This is the first time I’ve seen it and I think, among Miller’s most serious plays such as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, this is my favorite.

In this superb production Joe, played by Alec Baldwin, comes across at first as easy-going in style but driven from within. He speaks with an intimate and fascinating fast-talking hucksterism to the mark for the confident businessman who’s determined – oh so determined – to make the sale, and he builds the part to great intensity. Laurie Metcalf gives a nothing-short-of-great performance as the anguished Kate with much to hide, jerkily holding to the norms of social interactions while electrified from head to toe with fear and the determination to control a ruinous situation.

Miller based All My Sons in part on a news story about an aeronautical manufacturing company in Ohio that conspired with army inspection officers to approve defective aircraft parts, but he altered the story greatly. He also drew inspiration from Henrik Ibsen, both for his understanding of “the well made play,” and, from The Wild Duck, for the relationship between the two business partners.

I think also the play gains force from Miller’s adherence to Aristotle’s rules of unities in his Poetics: All My Sons is indeed a single story that unfolds in one place in a period of a day — and with a relentless uncovering of hidden guilt worthy of Greek tragedy. These are among the influences that flowed into Miller’s brilliant and original drama, a play fired by his grief over the war, his compassion for human beings, and his sense of justice. All that and a young playwright’s desire to write a play that as he said would be well received, and it was!

All My Sons is a gripping evening of theater. The story is tragic and one leaves exhilarated.

All My Sons plays at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY, through July 28, 2015. As I write, it’s near the end of its short run and the remaining performances are sold out.

Satomi Blair as Jocasta, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

Review | These Seven Sicknesses by Sean Graney | Directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar | Flea Theater | Featuring The Bats

By Yvonne Korshak

On January 30, 2012

In Adaptations From Great Authors, Off-Broadway Theater

Allison Buck as Tekmessa and Grant Harrison as Ajax, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

If you’re lucky enough to see These Seven Sicknesses, you’re in for a rich adventure. It’s like setting sail. First of all, you’ll walk in to a party — there’s a buzz, the actors, in costume, are there to talk with you, offering to bring you water or wine. This is transformative, opening you to whatever’s going to happen soon on the stage, that is, the wood floor between the facing banks of the audience.

The play is an ambitious and exciting weaving together of the seven extant plays of Sophocles. It follows their basic story lines and generally their emotional arcs while changing some aspects. To catch any of Sophocles’ words you have to think fast because the language is our current lingo and delivered with today’s expressions and body language, marvelously by a superb group of young actors — the Flea’s Bats. The stories are tragic, and Graney’s treatment of them is witty and hilarious. Since it’s a long evening¸dinner is served (by the actors to the audience) after Act I and — if you can believe it –- dessert comes after Act II, which leaves room for delightful conversation among the actors and audience. Feeling so well taken care of is in itself transformative.

For those who may know Sophocles’ plays and are interested in the order in which they’re taken up, Act I presents, with these titles, Oedipus [The King], In Trachis, In Colonus. Act II: Philoktetes, Ajax. Act III: Elektra, Antigone.

The opening act is over-compressed which led me to think These Seven Sicknesses might be superficial but — hold on, it isn’t! Still, much of Act I is performed with rambunctious speed. Oedipus acknowledges his guilt fairly early on so Sophocles’ portrait of him as a searcher for truth is lost. The Oedipus episode slows down, though, for its exciting, theatrical crescendo. In a scene poignantly played by Satomi Blair, Oedipus’ wife Jocasta, drenched in guilt at the discovery of her polluted marriage with her son, steps into her bath and cuts her wrists, her blood reddening the water (in Sophocles she hangs herself). In terms of the themes of blood and pollution in the play, as Ms. Blair commented to me in the intermission, this manner of suicide is rich in symbolism. To see a woman step into a bath on the plank floor between the facing banks of seats has character of a sacrifice: it”s “not in Sophocles” but it’s filled with suggestive resonance of other sacrifices of women in these plays and at the heart of much Greek drama.

Satomi Blair as Jocasta, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

Seth Moore as Philoktetes and Alex Herrald as Neoptolemus, photo Laura June Kirsch, courtesy Flea Theater

Philoktetes, next, follows most closely Sophocles’ actual and emotional story line, it’s given the time it needs, and is magnificently acted by Seth Moore: the upshot — a great Philoktetes! Years ago, as the story goes, the Greeks were headed to fight at Troy but the warrior Philoktetes had a gangrenous, disgusting leg wound, so they abandoned him on a desolate island — “They left cans of food for me but no can opener,” Philoktetes says. Now, after ten years of fruitless war, the prophetic word is out that the Greeks can’t capture Troy without Philoktetes’ magic bow. The play begins as Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, arrive on the island to get it. They and we meet a Philoktetes in agony, half-crazed with bitterness at the way he has been treated¸ his isolation, and the unrelenting pain of his rotting leg. With Odysseus and Neoptolemus plotting by fair means and foul to get that bow, the pain of suspicion is added to his anguish. Philoktetes covers the long stage with his one good leg and a make-shift crutch, his suppurating leg fallen upon, and stomped upon by Odysseus who’ll stop at nothing. In this episode several nurses, on hand throughout These Seven Sicknesses as a singing Greek chorus … Well, what they do here is an operation, more I will not say, except that it gives Seth Moore the opportunity to add some blood curdling cries of pain to his stunning performance.

Ajax, the story of another unappreciated warrior, omits Sophocles’ rich, long speeches but gives plenty of time to the main dramatic action, choreographed on a grand scale and performed with thrilling power, deft speed and spinning turns by Grant Harrison as Ajax. The hero whose name is proverbial for great strength is brooding over an unbearable blow to his honor: since Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, died, his armor was to be awarded to the next greatest fighter and in a vote the Greeks awarded it — not to Ajax but — to Odysseus. Ajax is agonizing over the intolerable insult when a squadron of armed men and women enter in a choreographed advance, uttering the low, oddly frightening bah’s of sheep. Driven by a passion to avenge his honor, and crazed by the disrespect, Ajax enters battle against what he thinks are his enemies and slaughters them all, only to find out that he has, in his insanity, slaughtered nothing but a herd of sheep.

After that, what’s left for a hero to do?

Philoktetes and Ajax emphatically bring to mind current issues: fruitless wars that last ten years, and the grievous plight of fighters, suffering wounds that won’t heal, lacking their due respect, who may be driven to violence and suicide. Seeing these issues laid bare in ancient stories expands them to the universal.

Other highlights include Kate Michaud’s passionate and complex performance as Herakles’ wife Dejanira, stung by Herakles’ rejection of her in favor of a younger woman but loving him still — with good reason, that’s one mighty, compelling Herakles played by Victor Joel Ortiz.

With the shaved head and dark garb of a Buddhist monk, Holly Chou, a brilliant character actor playing the Blind Seer, speaks prophetic ambiguities with precise articulation — what an irony!

Betsy Lippit bounds into Elektra an explosive tomboy. What a fury she is, grappling in full rage with her mother Clytaemnestra, who brings out her side of the story, played by Akyiaa Wilson. These are only among my favorite episodes and performances — there are great moments throughout. There are, after all, 7 plays and a cast of 37!

These Seven Sicknesses is a rich feast of theater!

These Seven Sicknessess plays at the Flea Theater in Manhattan’s Tribeca through March 4.*

*Due to popular demand, The Flea Theater will bring back THESE SEVEN SICKNESSES this summer. This critically lauded theatrical adaptation of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays (Oedipus, In Trachis, Philoktetes, In Colonus, Ajax, Elektra and Antigone) will return for a limited engagement June 6 through July 1