Akropolis's Oedipus shines

Oedipus and Jocasta


Oedipus and the Wheel of Fortune

[Photos by Julia Salamonk]

I saw Akropolis Performance Lab's Oedipus Saturday. I am seeing it again this Saturday.

Get tickets now; their shows are selling out. They have just added an 11pm show Saturday 6/16.

For tickets call Brown Paper Tickets, at 1-800-838-3006.

Full show info in this post.

More pix (& some spoilers) here, at www.myspace.com/akropolisperformancelab then click "Pics".

Mature audiences only; some nudity.

It was a double pleasure to see Akropolis -- with their Grotowski-lineage exactitude of physicality & harmony -- tackle something as infinite and iron as Oedipus. If you like Greek tragedies, you will love this production.

Akropolis productions are consistently world-theatre productions. It's like seeing one of Ariane Mnouchkine's or Robert LePage's productions -- the work is at a miraculously exacting standard of physicality and evocation which continues to nourish, stimulate, shock, feed, resonate for weeks afterward. Oedipus is no exception. It meets the shining standard established by Akropolis in their Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Jeanne The Maid, Song of Songs, and Macbeth.

The show is getting rave reviews. Look up this production on www.seattleperforms.com, and click the "Reviews" tab. I am overjoyed to see Akropolis finally starting to get the recognition and following it deserves.

The house in which this was performed was perfect. High-ceilinged, old wood floors, formal wallpaper, beams. It felt like the play had sprung, in living sprites, from the empty wood floor, to perform and vanish. Like a spring rain, saying "Oedipus was here."

I found it a surprisingly intimate production. There was not a lot of trapping or formality between me and Oedipus, the king. Instead, there stood this lean chiseled man, wrestling with his duty and his conscience, on a bare floor.

I heard once of an Antigone performed in the canyons of a National Park at dawn. "It felt not like a play, but like a ritual," said the spectator. "A ritual that takes place every dawn, somewhere in the world, and I had just happened to stumble upon it."

That's what this Oedipus was like. Somehow, between the cracks of the world, Oedipus sometimes issues forth and takes form, to ceaselessly try to solve the insoluble. Again he marries Jocasta. Again he discovers the truth. Again he vanishes. I wondered about the house we were in -- if it had older bones, older truths. Perhaps it is no coincidence where, on this earth, Oedipus appears; perhaps the cry can only ring forth where the cry has already been heard.