GOOD ADVERTISING MIGHT be the worst thing for theater. A bad play is just a bad play, but a bad play with a clever marketing strategy—that’s unforgivable. It’s the bait-and-switch that stings most and makes an audience resolve to never again be taken in by that slick-talking swindler named theater. After pointing out the emergency exits and reminding us about cell phones, the dutiful curtain speaker always says, “If you liked the show, please tell your friends. Word of mouth is the best advertising.” It is, at least, the most accurate. And a little more honesty in the marketing strategies (“A lackluster comedy—for friends of the cast only!”) might improve the art form, restore some integrity, and woo back the confidence of an already wary public.
The marketing for Akropolis Performance Lab’s Oedipus included a poster so controversial that some businesses, including a bar on Capitol Hill, either refused to hang it or only hung it with its image—a photograph of the back of a man’s head in front of a woman’s breast, ostensibly a grown-up Oedipus suckling on his mother’s teat—sliced off. (I always thought people hated classics because they’re usually done in a safe and sanitized way, that people would like them more if we amped up the sex and violence and lewd humor. But maybe people just fundamentally don’t like the classics.) Oedipus being probably the most famous story in Western literature—having influenced everything from Hamlet to Homer Simpson—it made sense to have an attention-grabbing poster.
The details of the performance also sounded promising, in a curious, high-art way: The Akropolis company works in the tradition of Jerzy Grotowski (physical acting styles, few sets or costumes or effects, and a ethos of ritual sacredness). This production is of Seneca’s version of the story. “It’s more internal,” director and lead actor Joseph Lavy said. “More about Oedipus’s inner conflict than the Sophocles version, which is more about Oedipus’s relationship with the citizens of Thebes.” There is polyphonic choral music from Russia, Macedonia, and Ukraine, sung by the actors. The show is performed in the Washington State Federation of Garden Clubs, a gabled old house on top of Beacon Hill. “We wanted the sense of spectators as guests in the house of Oedipus,” Lavy said, “that they’re in a haven up on the hill with the plague-ravaged city below.”
The play begins with the chorus singing a creepy, complicated Russian folk chant while Oedipus dances naked and couples with Jocasta in the dark. It’s exciting and a little shocking. Then the lights come up, the actors start talking, and everything falls apart. The production’s surrounding details are good—the gabled house, the wheelbarrow full of old shoes (from plague victims), the choral music with its haunting, tense, Eastern European sound—but the conviction the company radiates when they talk about the project never makes it onto the stage. The translation by Ted Hughes (poet, professor, husband to Sylvia Plath), sounds like something you’d want to read or recite but not perform as a drama. The actors emote and curse fate and kill people but never warm up. The ideas are fecund, but the performance is barren.
Like Oedipus, the press release for THEM!, a muddy sketch comedy that is weak in both the idea and the execution departments, also promised controversy: violated taboos, something to offend everyone. And like Oedipus, it disappoints. Never, it seemed, had such a small audience laughed so little for so long. The cast doesn’t have that tight ensemble feeling that sketch requires. Most of the ideas are weak: There is a speech by a woman who likes to eat men’s “ding-dongs”—by which she means Hostess Ding Dongs. (Hee-haw!) The cues are slow. The pacing is slack. As comedy, it’s a big pile of blah. The best bit is a seconds-long trailer for a TV show called Misidentified Flying Objects. Two women stand in low light. One looks up, points: “Look—a buffalo.” There is a beat. Then the lights go down. It’s simple, weird, and well timed. The rest is tired. (And, as usual, actor Ray Tagavilla is better than the production he’s in. Somebody get that man an agent.)
Underwhelming drama sometimes achieves the same effect as good drama—it makes us brood about the tragedy of flawed people slogging through a shitty world. Disappointing comedy is worse. It does the opposite of make us laugh.
