The riddle of the Sphinx plays out in the plot of Oedipus, notably in a scene near the end where the truth finally comes out. Two key figures from Oedipus’ childhood are interviewed: the Theban shepherd, who was supposed to kill baby Oedipus but did not; and the Corinthian messenger to whom he handed over the mutilated child. The Theban shepherd is living proof that the riddle of the Sphinx is difficult, because this man cannot recognize anyone: not the Corinthian, whom he last saw when he was young, and certainly not Oedipus, a baby with whom he had a deceased relationship. knowledge decades earlier. “It all happened so long ago,” he grumbles. “Why the hell would you ask me?”
“Because,” the Corinthian (David Strathairn) brilliantly explained over Zoom, “this man you are looking at now was once this child.”
For me, it was the scene with catharsis. At one point, the Shepherd (Frankie Faison) understood everything, but wouldn’t or couldn’t admit it. Oedipus, now determined to discover the truth at all costs, resorted to extensive interrogation. “Bend back his arms until they break,” said Isaac coldly; in another window, Faison was screaming in very realistic agony. Faison was a personification of psychological resistance: the mechanism a mind develops to protect itself from an unbearable truth. These invisible guards nearly killed him before he admitted who gave him the baby: “It was Laius’ child, or so people said. Your wife could tell you more.
Tears shone in Isaac’s eyes as he spoke the next line, which I suddenly understood to be the most devastating in the entire play: “Did…. . . She . . . give it to you?” How had I never fully realized, never felt, how painful it would have been for Oedipus to realize that his parents had not loved him?
In a famous early essay entitled “The Etiology of Hysteria” (1896), Freud described his treatment of eighteen patients suffering from severe hysterical symptoms. In each case, he laboriously traced each symptom as far back as human memory can go, to early childhood. Over the course of more than a hundred hours, each patient independently retrieved a memory of early childhood sexual trauma. The trauma frequently involved interaction with an adult, often a close relative, such as a father. Freud and the patients were horrified. Patients’ memories were “reproduced with the greatest reluctance,” Freud writes. “While they recall these childhood experiences to their consciousness, they suffer from the most violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to hide.”
Freud was extremely reluctant to believe that eighteen people from respected families in Vienna could have been abused as children. (Indeed, he soon departed from this conclusion, developing his idea of the Oedipus complex, according to which incestuous abuse was not a real memory, but rather an infantile fantasy.) But, at least by 1896, he found himself incapable not according to the experiences that patients have had in front of him. The remembered scenes fit the larger story with the specificity of a missing puzzle piece; in two cases he found witnesses to corroborate the patients’ memories. Thus, in “The Etiology of Hysteria”, as in “Oedipus the King”, an investigation into an inexplicable physical illness (hysteria for Freud, the plague for Sophocles) reveals an act of apparently unrelated violence, old of several decades and involving the father. against a child. Finding the truth is an immense ordeal. The ex-child denies it for as long as possible. When the truth is finally told, the plague is over.
When I spoke to Bryan Doerries over Zoom after the performance, he told me that he had originally planned to stage “Oedipus” with a focus on climate change. The themes were all there: a disproved prophecy; children pay for the sins of their fathers; a plague that “ravaged the land, killing livestock and crops,” and which Sophocles compared to a raging forest fire; as well as congenital malformations (“our women die in childbirth, giving birth to little shriveled corpses…”). He hoped to launch Greta Thunberg like Tiresias or the choir. But once COVID-19 occurred, and a physical plague began to reveal and exacerbate the pre-existing conditions of the body politic, a new application was required. (A British production of “Oedipus», with Damian Lewis, is scheduled for September 3. “The story of a leader who discovers he is the contagion will probably have a different resonance there,” Doerries mused; Boris Johnson had just returned to work after his own crisis COVID-19.)
Doerries’ first encounter with Greek tragedy was while playing one of the children of “Medea”. (It’s the one where Medea kills her children: her only sentence was: “No, no, the sword falls!”) It was 1985, and he was nine years old. The performance took place at a community college in Newport News, where Doerries’ father taught experimental psychology. Doerries describes his father as one of the last of the old-school behaviorists, a follower of B.F. Skinner, known for his belief that free will is an illusion and that human and animal behavior is determined by positive or negative conditioning. As a child, Doerries often visited his father’s laboratory, where he watched albino rats enact their fate through rewards and punishments. In one experiment, rats were electrocuted, seemingly at random, until they gave up on life, laying their heads on the floor of their cage and waiting to die.
Doerries went to Kenyon College, where he majored in classics, learning ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and the principles of biblical exegesis. When he and his father debated the meaning of Greek tragedy, his father believed that the plays represented a worldview in which people had no “human agency or consciousness.” Doerries disagreed. The analogy he uses today to describe fate in Greek tragedy is type 2 diabetes, the disease that ultimately killed his father. Most people who receive the diagnosis, he explains, have a genetic predisposition – it is “written into their DNA, like an ancient intergenerational curse” – but they can choose what they do with that knowledge, and choices can change their own lives and those of others. lives.
For his senior project, Doerries translated and staged Euripides’ “Bacchae,” using a Buick Skylark for the deus ex machina. A career choice loomed between academia and theater. Performing a classic text, translating it, and directing a play are traditionally seen as different tasks, to be accomplished by different types of professionals, but Doerries saw them as one thing: a set of techniques for making ancient plays for new audiences. He applied to graduate school for classics, then changed his mind and moved to New York to pursue a degree in directing.
In New York, he started dating Laura Rothenberg, a longtime friend, then a student at Brown, who had just received a double lung transplant as part of a long-term effort to treat the cystic fibrosis she had battled since childhood. Getting involved with her was a kind of test. As Doerries later wrote in “Theater of war», a book on the creation of his business. “From the moment we first kissed, awkwardly, hesitantly, in his apartment, I knew that I would soon face a choice, a choice that would define my own moral character and perhaps- be the rest of my life. my life. If I really cared about Laura, then I would put everything else aside. . . . But a nagging, persistent voice of self-preservation inside me told me to run away as quickly as possible.
He didn’t run away. The voice didn’t stop either. Doerries ended up being Rothenberg’s primary caregiver, and during that time he witnessed intubations, “air hunger” and “internal drowning” that accompany cystic fibrosis. He was twenty-six years old and had never felt closer to anyone, nor realized his own “immense capacity to care for another person.” At the same time, he discovered the limits of this compassion – the sometimes unbearable nature of the demand to be present – and had never felt so alone.
It was then that he re-read “Philoctetes” by Sophocles. It was as if it had been written for him. At the beginning of the play, Philoctetes has been stranded for ten years on a desert island, with a festering and foul-smelling wound in his foot. He was bitten by a snake when he and the other Greek warriors stopped on an island on their way to fight in the Trojan War. His cries of agony were destroying the morale of the other soldiers, so Odysseus left him behind. Then the Trojan War lasted a decade and a seer told Odysseus that the Greeks could not win without Philoctetes. Now Odysseus has returned to the island to collect it, bringing a young soldier, Neoptolemus, to speak.
