Review: Post-Oedipus at the Blue Theater

By Cleve Wiese

There’s the pleasure of watching tragedy. There’s the pleasure of being tragic. And then there’s the pleasure of watching characters taking pleasure in their own tragedy - which is a lot like comedy. Steven Gridley’s new play Post-Oedipus somehow manages to work effectively on all these levels, making it difficult to know exactly how to react to this genre-bending revision of Euripides’ Phoenician Women. But it also allows this genuinely unsettling show to be genuinely fun (and funny) to watch.

The play chronicles the fallout of that most familiar of Greek tragedies Oedipus Rex (in which Oedipus unknowingly kills his father, marries his mother, ascends the throne of Thebes, realizes his tragic mistake, blinds himself in remorse, etc.). Post-Oedipus opens with the erstwhile king reduced to a tottering invalid addicted to inspirational audio-books and impossible get-rich quick schemes to regain his royal power, while his wife/mother Queen Jocasta (the play’s real protagonist) wallows in her misery like a half-crazed, has-been Hollywood starlet waiting for her close-up, and the rest of the equally neurotic Cadmus clan tolerate their father, placate their mother, and attempt to mediate between the bickering brothers Polyneices and Eteocles (Seth Thomas and Stephen Cruz), whose contention for the throne threatens civil war.

But the family doesn’t seem to care nearly as much about what actually happens to them in the play as about how what happens gets described, photographed, projected onto a large screen that dominates the set’s back wall. And why not? Once tragic events have been captured for posterity by the camera-wielding messenger (stand-in for the Chorus) who follows every scene, they seem to have no real consequence: War dead and suicide victims alike pop back to their feet after their moment of glory to walk off stage.

Jocasta—played with a willowy intensity by Jennifer Gravenstein —is particularly intent on properly documenting her family catastrophe, and she has clear ideas about how this should be done. But like the rest of her family, she seems helpless to actually tell her own story, and its the Messenger (Helyn Rain Messenger) who really drives the action here, narrating events in self-consciously poetic terms, snapping pictures while the other characters eagerly posture and pose, supplying Jocasta’s most important lines, at one point even physically manipulating and ventriloquizing her like a human puppet. And when the play climaxes in a mock marriage-ceremony-of-death in which the warring brothers finally kill each other (the ultimate merging of tragedy and comedy), the messenger is there to capture the total disintegration of the Cadmus dynasty in freeze-frame. And since, in this play, there really is no meaning beyond photographs and stories that seems to provide a kind of comfort.

But it’s Getalong Gang’s razor-sharp presentation that really makes this challenging script work so well: Spencer Driggers' taut direction keeps the audience on its toes despite the rather lengthy running time; Zenobia Taylor’s stylized movement and choreography perfectly complements the absurdist tone of the play as a whole, and Steven Pruitt’s starkly atmospheric set and lighting - all exposed metal bars, ripped gauzy cloth, plain wood platforms - completes the picture.

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