This poetic adaptation of Philoctetes, by Sophocles, veers
between excellent and terrible.
In the excellent column: playwright Seamus Heaney’s colloquial
verse, the six stately actors portraying Greeks during the Trojan War,
and the set—a giant pile of white rubble resembling a heavy
cloud, designed by Blythe Quinlan.
In the terrible column: director Tina Landau’s instruction that the
three-man chorus sing its lines in harmony, here sounding like an
R&B boy band, there sounding like a adult-contemporary folk trio.
And Landau’s use of Viewpoints exercises (which, for the uninitiated,
look like a cross between yoga stretches and modern dance gestures).
Landau is a respected director, who has worked with Chicago’s
Steppenwolf Theatre and Viewpoints guru Anne Bogart. But the acting
exercises that she and Bogart popularized are best kept in the
rehearsal hall. Seeing them tacked onto the stage action sucks us out
of the world of the play every time.
And what a world it is: When the Greeks were on their way to Troy, a
warrior named Philoctetes suffered a cursed snakebite that lamed his
foot and gave him horrible shrieking fits. So Odysseus, on behalf of
the Greeks, abandoned their useless warrior on a barren island. Ten
years later, the Greeks learned they needed Philoctetes’s bow (which he
inherited from Hercules) to win the war. The play begins with wily
Odysseus and innocent Neoptolemus returning to the island to trick the
homicidally bitter Philoctetes into lending his bow for the Greek
cause. It’s a study in rhetoric and trickery, and the actors, when
they’re allowed to simply speak Heaney’s text, hold our
attention—particularly Boris McGiver as the wild and pissed-off
Philoctetes, a noble man driven partway mad by hurt and loneliness.
Heaney’s language is straightforward and rewarding, with individual
lines leaping out of the text like fish: “How am I to keep on praising
the gods when they keep on disappointing me?” And: “History says,
‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.'”
But the result is a production that insists on breaking its own
spell.
