OEDIPUS REQUIEM
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In reshaping these three plays into a single play, David Perkins might seem to be defying disaster with an ambition Oedipus himself might have feared. And by employing the form of a memory play, in which the story is related in hallucinatory, fragmented flashbacks, Perkins’s Oedipus Requiem certainly goes against the structure of Greek tragedy, with its chronological unfolding of narrative.
But the risks Perkins has taken in adapting and directing Oedipus Requiem from various translations of the three Sophocles texts have paid off handsomely. Oedipus Requiem is an often beautiful and always interesting work. It has its problems, and the three hours are uneven; but when it clicks–when Perkins’s directorial intelligence and his actors’ talents mesh with the classic material–the effect is electric.
With an exceptionally large cast for a non-Equity production, Oedipus Requiem is occasionally marred by inconsistent acting; but the ensemble passages are quite affecting–with the chorus functioning as the socially diverse group of individuals that makes up a city–and there are superb individual performances by Larry Neumann Jr. as Oedipus, Palmar Hardy as his wife-mother, Jocasta, Wendy Fulton as the servant who describes Jocasta’s suicide, Tim Decker as Polyneices, Brian Shaw as Haimon, and Dorothy Bernard as the androgynous Teiresius (here presented as a tough old woman in the robe of an Oxford don accompanied by a gaunt undergraduate assistant). Michael Mix’s sprawling set, an expanse of white stairways and platforms with Antigone’s tomb at its core (just as the inevitability of death is at the core of Sophocles’ immortal masterpiece) makes a beautiful three-dimensional canvas for Kurt Ottinger’s dramatic, red-dominated lighting scheme. Darice Damata-Geiger’s costume design, in an early-20th-century mode, intelligently clarifies the social and familial relationships of the characters and their physical and emotional developments.
