Elemental journey

Oedipus rules at the ART

WHITE-FACED AND DESPERATELY SMILING: as Jocasta, Stephanie Roth-Haberle gives a highly physical, even antic performance in which hysteria brims just beneath a public mask.

If you made an opera out of Endgame, it might have something of the desolate yet soaring feel of the American Repertory Theatre’s muscular Oedipus. Robert Woodruff’s production of the 2500-year-old tragedy, which contrasts rationality with a mounting hysteria born out in Evan Ziporyn’s dissonant choral score, is not the most compelling modern treatment of Greek tragedy in recent memory; that would be the terrifying Medea that director Deborah Warner built around the family swimming pool and Fiona Shaw’s ravaged whirlwind of a woman scorned. But this Oedipus has some of the inexorability of that production, which came to the Wilbur Theatre in 2002. And abetted by Ziporyn’s ravishingly discordant music and Saar Magal’s sinuous waves of movement, it takes that lemon of most contemporary productions, the stilted and action-stopping contributions of the Chorus, and makes a lemonade so piercing on the tongue that you almost forgive said tongue for being Ancient Greek, thereby forcing your eye to the supertitles.

I didn’t love every moment of this strongly conceived production, but I loved the way every moment has been penetratingly addressed at the same time that Woodruff adheres to an overarching design in which Oedipus’s anguished journey — played out on a rubbly rectangle with no place to hide for rutting royal couple or the band — takes him from the political to the personal. "Now I am Oedipus," reads the final supertitle, putting a period on the doomed antihero’s descent from "Rex" or "Tyrannus" to what Lear calls "the thing itself." Yet Woodruff’s is not so much a purely existential reading of the text as it is a paean to a corruption that dares to ferret itself out — in stark contrast to the ones we’re used to here in polis America, in which cover-up begets cover-up begets cover-up.

John Campion, an assertive Oedipus from statesmanly start to bloody finish, begins by coming down to sit on the front lip of the rectangular enclosure behind which the entire backstage is exposed. "Why are you here?" he asks reasonably, addressing us, though the Chorus Leader (Thomas Derrah), spokesman for a Thebes ravaged by war and plague, answers. The exchange, partly in Greek, is formal, but the translation by Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay is streamlined and vivid, full of images of heat and rot. Then the Depression-era-clad eight-person Chorus adds its operatically trained, many-pronged voice to the fray, ratcheting up the primal tensions of the piece and bringing closer to the center the sick, bedraggled populace, loyal to its leader but desperate for relief.

For the amplified heterophonic score, Ziporyn, who is head of music and theater arts at MIT and a member of Bang on a Can All-Stars, melds Western and Eastern instruments and styles, mixing melodious — and sometimes screeching — cello, bass, keyboards, and guitar with Chinese and Javanese percussion. The rich-toned part singing is similarly contrasted with Indonesian vocalist I Nyoman Catra’s arresting but more abrasive sound. Catra also epitomizes the theater piece’s subtle choreography, augmenting a solo stasimon, for example, by slow-motion movement that shifts between balance and imbalance. Elsewhere, the Chorus moves sideways across the stage like a tight, swaying knot.

Even without the embellishments of music and movement, this Oedipus would not be your grandfather’s mix of Freud, forensics, and learning the consequences of temper, hubris, and trying to outfox fate. Modern images abound, from the Chorus’s propping of photographs of dead loved ones against the lip of the rectangle to the business-suited mannequin corpse strung up in harness over the playing space. Striding or crouching, in boots and military overcoat, Campion is a seductive but bullying Oedipus whose agitation dissipates into something like wretched composure when, revealed facing upstage at a long dressing table, blind, bloody, and shirtless, he pours subdued, rumbling misery into his final exchanges with the Chorus and its Leader. (One caveat: whatever Oedipus is up to behind that insufficiently opaque curtain, presumably applying blood and gore, it’s distracting.)

But Woodruff’s vision of a soothing-dictator Oedipus is tame next to the white-faced, desperately smiling Jocasta electrifyingly personified, in spike heels and increasing déshabillé, by Stephanie Roth-Haberle. Hers is a highly physical, even antic performance in which hysteria brims just beneath a public mask on which desperation dukes it out with frantically chipper damage control. Woodruff has eliminated the play’s final speech, in which the Chorus Leader cautions us to count no man happy until he’s dodged the last bullet. But Roth’s final crawl upstage to collapse in a bedraggled heap says all you need to know about humankind brought low.

  Oedipus 

By Sophocles. Translated by Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay. Directed by Robert Woodruff. Original music by Evan Ziporyn. Set by Doug Stein, assisted by Peter Ksander. Costumes by Kasia Walicka Maimone. Lighting by Christopher Akerlind. Sound by David Remedios. Movement by Saar Magal. Chorus master Pamela Murray. With John Campion, Thomas Derrah, Michael Potts, Novella Nelson, Stephanie Roth-Haberle, Eliza Rose Fichter, Olivia Beckett Wise, Timur Bekbosunov, I Nyoman Catra, Jodi Dick, Suzanne Ehly, Paul Guttry, Anne Harley, Paul Shafer, Kasia Sokalia, and musicians Nathan Davis, Ha-Yang Kim, Jeff Lieberman, and Blake Newman. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through June 13.