By Jack DesBois
This year, Staunton theatergoers are getting their fill of Greek tragedy with performances of all three episodes of Sophocles’ iconic Oedipus trilogy. When current S&P second-year student Christian Fernandez proposed the idea of directing the trilogy’s book-end plays Oedipus the King and Antigone, he learned that the American Shakespeare Center already had a production of Antigone in the works, directed by S&P Assistant Professor Doreen Bechtol – great minds think . Seizing the opportunity, Fernandez instead decided to pair his production of King with Sophocles’ lesser-known middle play, Oedipus at Colonus. Mary Baldwin University’s King and Colonus enjoyed runs in September 2018 at Stuart Hall School’s King Theatre.
Olivia Gorra’s performance of the title role in both Mary Baldwin productions set a tone of intense pathos for the duology. Her portrayal of the ill-fated king’s reluctant realization of his own unwitting acts of patricide and incest took the audience to realms of ever-increasing horror, culminating with Oedipus’s gut-wrenching return to the stage after gouging out his own eyeballs in despair. Supporting Gorra’s tour-de-force in King, Jessie Lillis as Oedipus’ wife/mother Jocasta provided a second heart-rending perspective on the perversity of the couple’s situation. Emily Erblich offered a well-timed cameo moment of comic relief as the Corinthian Messenger, a sharp contrast to her equally adept portrayal of Theseus, the Athenian king and champion of justice in Oedipus at Colonus.
King left audience members hanging on the edge of their seats, but they had to wait another week for the completion of Oedipus’ story. When Colonus hit the Stuart Hall stage, the seats were nearly packed. Theatre-goers were not disappointed; they found in Mary Baldwin’s Colonus a rarely-seen side of Sophocles’ cycle as the Gods redeem the suffering king and provide him his long-awaited final consummation. Gorra elegantly navigated the play’s change of pace, supported (literally) by Paula Shute and Heron Kennedy as his loving daughters Antigone and Ismene and Gil Mitchell as his beseeching son Polynices.
Sophocles’ poetry, in the Robert Fagles verse translation, fared especially well in the recitations of Fernandez’s eight-actor Chorus. Transforming from the fear-ridden Theban rabble of King to the powerful and unified Athenian people in Colonus with the help of mesmerizing walking-staff choreography, the Chorus became a visually and aurally arresting backbone for the duology. Their chant-like songs, especially a haunting duet in Colonus by Jessie Lillis and Alex Stroud, were particularly striking, helping to transport the audience to the fantastic world of Greek mythology.
While Colonus wrapped up Oedipus’s story, leaving the audience at peace with the protagonist’s fate, unresolved squabbles among his family members set the stage for his daughter to lead the trilogy’s third and final installment. Staunton theatregoers will need to wait with bated breath for Antigone, now playing as part of the ASC’s “Hand of Time” tour, to return to the Blackfriars Playhouse next spring 2019 – or catch the show on the road.
