All Fates Are Black

Greek tragedy used to be inaccessible to the American temperament. In a play like Oedipus, for example, it was felt that the punishment of the hero was horrifyingly in excess of his crime, and that too much of the action rested with the will of the gods and too little within the control of the man. In the past decade, public events have brought home to Americans a growing awareness that fate may not be in one's hands but at one's throat. The dirgelike destiny of the Kennedys, the war in Viet Nam, racial turmoil, urban carnage, the generational vendetta and the growth of drug addiction have moved an entire nation toward at least the beginnings of a tragic sense of life.

What this means in terms of the theater is that U.S. stages are likely to carry a far higher traffic of classic Greek tragedies in the '70s than they ever have before. Some of these will be presented unmodified in fresh and colloquial translations. Others, like the new off-off-Broadway Roundabout Theater production of Oedipus, will alter the text in order to link it more closely to contemporary minds, sensibilities and responses. It is important to note that the playwright, Anthony Sloan, a pseudonym adopted by the Roundabout's artistic director, Gene Feist, has not tampered with the basic myth. Oedipus has murdered his father, married his mother, sired an incestuous brood, and his eyes are gouged out. What Sloan has done, albeit with lesser aesthetic power and wit, is what Anouilh and Giraudoux have done with the Greek myths.

Awareness of Death. Sloan's locale is a presidential palace in a Caribbean republic in the early 1930s. His emphasis is on death, ritual and the family. The family is presented as a verbal killing ground where people prepare for real death. The ritual of death itself is a coup de theatre, a mock bullfight complete with toreador costumes in which the killers and the killed are all humans. The conceit works in that both Greek tragedy and the bullfight derive their heightened drama from an imminent awareness of death.

In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Oedipus and Jocasta's daughters, Antigone and Ismene, are very young and silent. Sloan, however, has drawn on all versions of the Oedipus myth, and in his play the daughters are teen-agers or older, both articulate judges of their parents. Antigone is a haughty spitfire, Ismene a dutiful but skeptical daughter. Unlike Sophocles, Sloan includes the incestuous pair's son Polynices and implies a homosexual relationship with Jocasta's nephew Haemon. A very up-to-date household, indeed. When Oedipus is bent on throttling Haemon at one point, Jocasta begs him to stop, calling out "Oedipus, I am your mother--obey me!" The irony, and the insight, of Sloan's version of the myth is that Oedipus has deeply known it all along, known that the skeleton in every man's closet is himself. So has Jocasta known it. So have the children. This is not, therefore, a discovery of the self but an unveiling of the rottenness of the self. Sloan seems to be saying that this is the way the world runs from day to day, with people living out lies, guarding their "images" and losing their souls until the inadvertent truth, like murder, outs.

Oedipus depends on the title actor. Gordon Heath, who last played on a U.S. stage 22 years ago, has the regal carriage and authority of a king, the torn heart of a father, the muted passion of a husband and lover who finds himself a son. Since he is black, he is, like his ancient predecessor, "a stranger in Thebes." But he knows that black is the color of all men's fates. After he is blinded, a weeping Jocasta (Elizabeth Owens) asks, "What words do you have for me, Oedipus?" His answer strikes the purest vein of authentic Greek terror, the knowledge that never to have been born at all would be the only good destiny. Oedipus, the sightless seer, says:

You will live, Jocasta. That is my sentence upon all of you. You will live.

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