Two strong voices and a classic drama
For composer and director, 'Oedipus' is starting point for collaboration
By Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff  |  May 9, 2004 The Boston Globe

CAMBRIDGE -- A creepy, ominous drone winds through the dim basement room that the American Repertory Theatre uses for rehearsals. The sound, low and relentless, is coming from strings and gongs, Tibetan bowls and metal pipes. It builds slowly as the actors and musicians work through a scene from the ART's forthcoming production of Sophocles' "Oedipus," a collaboration between director Robert Woodruff and noted composer Evan Ziporyn that uses music to underscore the ritual aspects of the ancient text. The musicians -- percussionist Nathan Davis, cellist Ha-Yang Kim, guitarist/keyboardist Jeff Lieberman, and bassist Blake Newman -- pause to work on a speaker problem with the tech guys. Meanwhile, Woodruff confers quietly with Ziporyn, who has never composed for a play before; they're trying to find the precise moment when the music should come to dominate the scene.

" Can I have a line in the shepherd scene?" Woodruff asks, and an assistant offers something. "It's too predictable," Woodruff says. "Let me see the text." He takes the script, then hands it back. "It's too on the head." The equipment still isn't working, so Woodruff walks around, checking in with the actors; he touches John Campion's shoulder and pats Thomas Derrah's head. Campion will be Oedipus, Derrah the chorus leader in the production, which opens in previews Saturday.

In this scene, Derrah watches as Oedipus confronts the shepherd who, instead of following a mother's orders to abandon an infant on a hillside, gave him away -- thereby making it possible for that child (guess who) to grow up and fulfill the dreadful prediction that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Finally the speaker is fixed, and they play the scene again. Over and over, Campion repeats Oedipus' cry of half-veiled despair: "Why didn't you just let him die?" The music rises and falls, stops, starts again. It builds to a crescendo as Oedipus orders his men to string up the shepherd for interrogation. (Onstage, Novella Nelson will be lifted up with ropes and a motor; in rehearsal, she simply raises her arms to indicate the action.) The music rises, then cuts out.

" The out's clunky," Woodruff says.

Ziporyn nods.

Woodruff gets an idea. "We've got this sound of the chain motor," which will lift Nelson. "It could be part of the music." He grins, then asks stage manager Chris De Camillis how loud the motor is.

" Loud enough that most directors want to make it quiet," De Camillis says. He goes to check, the musicians start again, and Ziporyn and Woodruff discuss whether the new idea will work.

`Distant and right' Earlier, in Woodruff's office at the ART, where he is the artistic director, Woodruff and Ziporyn talked about how their collaboration works.

"You want your collaborator to do what he does. You want the voice of a composer," Woodruff says. "You don't want to say, `Now give me a nice piece of music that goes here' -- you don't want that kind of agreement; you want a strong voice."

Rather than following the text too closely, he says, the music should stay at some distance from it: "Godard had this phrase: `distant and right.' " The French filmmaker was speaking of the relationship between image and text, Woodruff says, but the idea also applies to music and text: "They could be too close, they could be too far apart so there was no connection, or they could be -- distant and right. That's what you're always seeking. Then it's going to resonate."

" You want resonance without duplication," Ziporyn says. "The obvious choice; if it works too well, it doesn't work. If it fits too closely, then it doesn't fit."

Working with a theatrical director is a new experience for the prolific Ziporyn, who heads the music and theater arts department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's a risk," he says, for himself as well as for Woodruff, but he finds that risk exhilarating. And just as Woodruff has trusted him to bring his own voice to the composition, Ziporyn has called on the musicians not just to play his composed choruses, but also to make their own contributions in a kind of "structured improvisation."

One of the singers is I Nyoman Catra, "a brilliant dancer and singer in a completely non-Western style," Ziporyn says. "He's never been thrown into the heart of the Western canon in this way, and I sort of want him to just do what he does. I said to him, `Don't worry about trying to meet anything halfway.' You want independence, ultimately, and you want listening. . . . You don't want to bury who everybody is and what they can bring to the table."
What Ziporyn brings to the table, among other gifts, is a deep background in a range of European and Asian musical traditions. "I've been trying to write music that is really my conception of choral music," he says: "rhythms I've learned from transcribing Pygmy music, or harmonics from Eastern European music."

So what does it sound like? "I felt the material had to be really stark at a certain level," Ziporyn says, "and really about sound -- reaching into the primality of sound, sound that would be really stripped down and yet ring." Think of a cello, with its resonant overtones, or the layered ringing of a Tibetan bowl. And the musical ideas connect to Ziporyn's understanding of what it means to stage a play when the audience already knows how it ends.

"What are you actually doing when you do `Oedipus'? Everybody already knows the story," Ziporyn says. "Musically, for me, that meant this is ritual. It's not like this is `The Crying Game' or `The Sixth Sense,' where there's a big secret that comes out at the end. I just don't see how you can do `Oedipus' that way."


For Woodruff, too, the interest of the play lies less in plot than in ideas, and in engagement with the world. "The wonderful thing about the Greeks is that the personal and the political are always mirrored in the same moment," he says. "And these plays always provide such a great opportunity to work with composers, because they built these things this way. They were doing philosophical musicals -- political debate with music."

A hum, then a thud Back in the rehearsal hall, as Campion's miked voice echoes across the space -- distant and right -- De Camillis comes back with bad news about the sound of the motor. "Unfortunately," he says, "it's a low, imperceptible hum." Woodruff and Ziporyn talk a minute, then have the musicians and actors play through again.

" Yeah, it's -- yeah. Nope," Woodruff says when the music stops, just as it did before. "The out doesn't work." The music swells on the last line, he says, "and it feels like it's too easy. And then when that goes out, the bottom drops out." While he and Ziporyn huddle, the musicians chat and noodle around. Lieberman hits a few keys on the keyboard, which Ziporyn has programmed with gong tones; Davis responds with a soft thud on an actual gong. Ziporyn cocks his head and walks over to listen.

" Hey, check this out," he calls to Woodruff. The musicians do their "dueling gongs" again as the bassist fades out. Woodruff nods. "Yeah, let's try that."

They play the scene again, but this time, when the bass drops out, the low gong remains. It's less overtly dramatic, more subtle, than the dead stop before.

" It's OK," Woodruff says. "Good. Stop. That's OK." He calls a 10-minute break.
In the hallway, Ziporyn considers the moment. "You always get to the point where there is an obvious solution, and then he doesn't like it because it's too obvious," he says. "And that's when it gets really interesting."

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 

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