A friend of mine, raised Catholic but now a practicing pagan, once explained to me the difference between Christian and pagan prayer. “We don’t kneel,” she proclaimed. “We don’t bow in submission to a divine other. We stand tall and proud, our arms outspread, to embrace the gods all around us.”
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Best of all, The Gospel at Colonus erases the lines between “amateur” and “professional,” and audience and performer. The cast is a combination of full-time, union-dues-paying actors and singers and community-based choristers who are no less artists for earning their livings outside of music and theater. Such a combination could only work under the supervision of a director who is both a consummate professional and truly committed to theater as a people’s art form. Lee Breuer is such a director, and for those weary of a musical theater that steamrolls audiences into submission–yes, I mean The Phantom of the Opera, among others–The Gospel at Colonus is nothing less than a faith-restoring affirmation of theater as a fundamental, emotionally enriching human activity.
This, of course, is what the ancient Greeks had in mind when they unveiled their new plays at religious festivals. Oedipus at Colonus was first produced at Athens’s festival of Dionysus in 401 BC, about five years after the death of its author. Sophocles wrote the work shortly before his death, when he was about 90; it was the climax not only of his life and career but of the trilogy for which he is best known–the tragedies detailing the sorrows of the house of Oedipus. Working from a legend already ancient when he approached it, Sophocles created a cycle of plays that spoke directly to his own time and place as well as to larger concerns whose universality has kept these dramas alive over some 2,400 years of religious and political change.
Gospel singer Clarence Fountain is plain perfect as Sophocles’ hero: proud and cocky yet humbled by a hard life, rustic and raw (as Oedipus would be, having lived in the wilderness) and actually blind, Fountain portrays a sightless man with no theatrical artificiality. And in Oedipus’s showdown with the wily Theban king Creon, Sophocles’ dramatic theme is expanded by the playful but not frivolous competition between Fountain, a major star in his own musical field, and guitar-wielding soul singer “Pops” Staples, who contributes an original song.
