The Greek Plays

Ellen McLaughlin

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781559366274
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

New adaptations of Greek masterpieces. Performed at major universities nationwide.

Oedipus

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Introduction

Part 1

I was commissioned in early 2004 to write a new version of Oedipus for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, to be directed by my old friend and collaborator, Lisa Peterson.

It was Lisa who had the idea for the production and Lisa who brought her suggestion to Joe Dowling, who not only took her up on it, but scheduled a slot for it in the next season, script unseen. I’m tremendously grateful to Lisa for her inspiration and to Joe for his faith in me and for the chance to work on the play.

To be honest, I had never been particularly drawn to Oedipus, though it is probably the only Greek play of which a majority of any audience would at least know the basic plot. My reluctance may have had to do with precisely that phenomenon—the prospect of coping with two thousand plus years of scholarship and reverence was quite intimidating. But Lisa’s interest in the play as a means of confronting the issue of American identity at this moment in history intrigued me. She felt that the play would provide a lens through which to look at our deep aversion to coming to terms with our own past and the consequences of our actions. That notion inspired me to look at the play differently.

I began to read translations and do research and, in April 2004, I wrote Lisa a letter, focusing on the aspects of the play I was beginning to be most interested in exploring.

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I enclose an edited version of the letter below:

Dear Lisa,

Just thought I’d put some notes together, the kinds of things I’ve been thinking about as I mull over the play and get to know it better. They are in no particular order.

• I’ve been trying to understand why I find this play somewhat repellent, and perhaps why I haven’t approached it before. I suppose that there is something disturbing to me about what I sense is a sort of ancient Greek version of original sin. The idea that this particular child at least is born a sinner, born doomed. He is fated not only to suffer—as are all men—but to do terrible things even as he thinks he is doing right. What should we learn from this? That the gods are to be feared? That when we search for the transgressor, the source of our sorrow, we must search first the house of our own soul?

Or is it that we learn from Oedipus the true price of self-knowledge—that to be human is to be both entirely innocent and entirely guilty, the holy/accursed thing that so few of us ever have the courage to confront in the mirror? Is the point that by the end of the play, Oedipus finally must acknowledge himself, for the first time, as being truly and simply human—the solution to the riddle—no longer exempt, no longer exceptional, except in the sense of being the most radical example of the constraint of being human? I am still quite flummoxed by this and expect to be thrashing it out for some time.

• I’d like to focus on telling the story so that it’s more of an effective mystery. Time after time in the Sophocles, Oedipus is presented with so much information that it seems impossible he doesn’t put the mystery together. The denial is so great as to defy credulity.

The first moment that would demand rethinking would be Tiresias’ contribution to the story, such that he’s not quite so explicit, so spang on the head about what will happen to Oedipus. What seems most important about what he tells Oedipus about the future is (a) that Oedipus is in fact the blind man and that his blindness will be manifest in time, and (b) that he is the monster he seeks.

Similarly, I’d like to look at Jocasta’s contribution to the revelation and think in terms of honing down the information she gives, perhaps to the single revelation of the killing taking place at a crossroads. Otherwise there’s just too much of what she says that Oedipus simply can’t hear and believably still fail to put it together. I’ll be looking throughout for such opportunities, but these are the obvious ones at the moment.

• Considering the business of contemporary relevance—how does this play speak to our times? Well, how did it speak to its own times?

Oedipus was born of the dreadful combination of a plague year and a war year. The plague is attributed to Ares, the god the gods would exile if they could, who presided over “death breeding death,” both war and pestilence. The play was, we think, written in 430 B.C., the plague year that was the second year of the Peloponnesian War, the war that would prove in time to be the undoing of the Athenian people and their civilization. The way the plague is described—this consuming, rampant image of death moving through the city—makes one think at the same time of what the war was doing to Athens. This must have had resonance for the audience, as it will have resonance for us, in the second year of what looks to be an unending war, as will the idea of a political leader who is, knowingly or not, the cause of his people’s suffering.

• Numbers thread through the text. The three roads, the riddle of the Sphinx. But it is a rather crude math—no numbers over four, the number needed for a child’s locomotion—and that rudimentary, brutal math matches the blunt riddle of his life. The basic math of a normal life keeps eluding him. There should be two women—mother and wife—rather than one. The puzzle of his existence keeps confounding him, because it is so obviously wrong, I suppose. One plus one keeps equaling one in his case. It happens again and again. He is the investigator of a crime, the prosecutor and the judge, but then he also turns out to be the criminal he has been pursuing and has already condemned. Similarly, he turns out to be both the physician and the disease he is attempting to eradicate. There is something about numbers counted out of sequence that may be of use. Oedipus is presented as a mathematician working out the fact that he is himself the solution to his own horrible problem.

• I am increasingly fascinated by the phenomenon of the crossroads—the place where all the various paths of a life, all the possibilities, converge in one fate. I think it may have something to do with the perception of the female sexual organs, that site of mystery and origin, the place where the line between the legs meets the V of the pubis.

There is a Pan-African notion of the trickster, a figure who is always l...