Herakles Unwound
BERMEL, ALBERT
On stage By Albert Bermel Herakles Unwound Sophocles' The Trachiniae is not a play that commends itself to modern directors, and scholars have long faulted it on several grounds. It lacks the...
...In contrast to the other three women of Trachis, she is a newlywed, at once indignant at her seniors for their skepticism and fearful that her own marriage may go the way of theirs...
...We ask (usually in vain) for build-ups to lead into great resolutions...
...by saying that the playwright "seems to have become so preoccupied with presenting Herakles' physical agony that he loses sight of Deianeira, his truly great tragic creation, and the artistic integrity of the whole piece is correspondingly impaired...
...as a rule, directors take droits de seigneur and rape the play before its big night...
...In Alec Murphy's high-comic performance he is a panting, wild-haired creature, always at a loss for something his mind, for instance...
...there is no way of knowing...
...their markings and embroidery vary, but they match and do not draw attention to themselves...
...He was supposed to be serving the Lydian queen Omphale, but has been living with her...
...And in a last daring scene he brings on the monarch of the gods as a Zeus ex machina...
...The designer, Leo B. Meyer, has been thoughtful enough not to encroach unnecessarily on the generous acting area...
...Perhaps one must go to the European theater for analogues, yet I would not wish to drum home any particular resemblances...
...Stage 73 has, for off-Broadway, a virtually panoramic stage...
...It has solid Greek foundations and dignified English fluting on its columns, and it is capped by a Frenchly cynical pediment...
...He swiftly marries his son off to Iole, and survives long enough to struggle up the nearest mountain...
...Abel punctures the Herakles myth devastatingly when Lykhas recounts the "real" reason why Herakles undertook his twelve labors in the first place...
...Anne Meacham gives a queenly presence and clean enunciation to Deianeira, but she will not stay inside the role's boundaries...
...The build-up may be colossal, but building up has become a commonplace craft...
...Jon Cypher bustles about the stage with what looks very much like Heraklean fervor...
...Sometimes they cajole information out of the men...
...If it is a sample of the "Metatheater" that Abel wrote about in his recent book of criticism (and it may well be in one respect: His definition of Metatheater seemed to embrace just about every good thing in the drama since Calderon), then we must hail the arrival of a dramatic style that both assembles comic elements from all over the place and also maintains some objectivity...
...In return, Deianeira sends him the robe, blouse, or shirt, impregnated with the centaur's poisoned blood...
...Now that the York Theater has gone out of commission it is good to know that there is one playhouse where the actors need not be cramped together...
...As Nessus expires he instructs Deianeira to wrap up a little of his clotting blood and save it...
...There Philoktetes sets fire to him...
...Directorial restraint is an uncommon virtue these days...
...It has an unforced language that lets epigrams and complex thoughts arise effortlessly from the dialogue...
...The Wives is entertaining from beginning to end...
...The result is not a tragedy and not a melodrama but, of all things, a comedy of manners, replete with verbal fireworks...
...Topped with a monstrous yellow wig and sheathed in the demureness of a white gown, Miss Miner stalks about the proscenium, lying in her teeth as she tells Deianeira, "My husband can't boast of his infidelities to me...
...I can think of no similar play in the American repertory...
...It lacks the angry tragic force of Oedipus Rex, Ajax, Antigone, and Electra...
...If anything, they are one disappointment after another...
...at least, she makes them seem so...
...My own instinct is to side with Oates...
...His lateral set places three square arches in pinkish stone before a green and blue Mediterranean backdrop...
...But there are several other actors in the cast who play with equal concentration and exactness...
...This conservation of energy allows it to move at its own gathering speed...
...It is as though Abel had closed off the play in a pool of this Greek light and kept us circling its perimeter to watch each character's concern with the possibility of tempting fate and getting away with it, of leaving on the world a mark that is unmistakably his own...
...rather, it has furnished the raw materials for a beautifully wrought American comedy that respects the wit of its audience...
...Abel relishes the fundamentals of the plot enough not to tamper with them...
...Herakles fires off a poisoned arrow and hits Nessus with it...
...like the will of the gods it has an unvarying brightness but its photosynthetic effects on men are not predictable...
...In much the same way Herbert Machiz has not interfered with the play by poking distracting movements into it...
...Sometimes they chat reminiscently about such matters as wife- and husband-swapping...
...Comedies as stimulating as this one do not currently reach production...
...and the four women of Trachis who are no longer a chorus only but four well-defined people each of whose life is a variation on, and an echo of, Deianeira's...
...E. F. Watling, who has made the best-actable modern translation of the play {Women of Trachis in Sophocles: Electra and Other Plays, Penguin), rebuts Oates' charge, claiming that "the center and focus of its theme is surely Herakles Herakles as seen through the eyes of his wife [He] is continually present to our minds so that his eventual appearance, prepared for by the 'build-up' of the preceding scenes (perhaps the most remarkable example of 'build-up' in all dramatic literature...
...Abel has seen Deianeira and the Fourth Woman as nearly innocent not quite, because in this play no woman is free of guilebut Miss Meacham doesn't trust herself to keep a straight face and a cool voice while the rest of the cast is enjoying the mockery...
...He is in despair trying to find some woman I can respect...
...Its comedy becomes more tense as the story tightens...
...But given an underlying seriousness...
...this is too effective a moment to give away in summary, and so is his final choice between Deianeira and Iole...
...This light is the objective factor in the story...
...Now and again they pounce on one another (First Woman: "I wouldn't want you around if I were in trouble...
...Perhaps they are not being written...
...He has given all the characters modern-sounding motives...
...As the disillusioned and faintly dissolute Third Woman, Jan Miner has the best lines and shafts of the play...
...THE ACTION takes place outside Deianeira's house in a courtyard bathed in sunlight...
...three-quarters of the way through it, the main character Deianeira disappears and the final quarter is given over to the garrulous death of her husband Herakles...
...Third Woman: "When you are, I'll be there...
...far from being an anti-climax, is the true climax of the play...
...He has introduced not one but several showdowns between Herakles and his wife...
...While she was sleeping with the strange man, "I had such a feeling of security, which I think I never could have had if my husband had not been in the next room" The comic butt is Hyllos, the utterly unheroic offspring of Herakles and Deianeira...
...It is treacherous...
...Abel's main comic tool is the presence of the women of Trachis, four suburban matrons two blondes, two brunettes whose quips about married love keep fortifying Deianeira's anguish...
...His costumes are authentically Greek...
...He has also sacked the city of Oechalia in order to get hold of its princess, lole...
...By comparison, the comedies of Barry, Sherwood, and Behrman seem hackish and sickly...
...He has yet to be involved with any woman I don't look down on...
...working off his bewilderment by running up and down the road to Trachis, pulling daggers on people, to his surprise, and putting them away humbly...
...Many years later, Deianeira has unarguable reasons to fear that she has lost his love...
...it is purely Greek...
...Meanwhile, Sophocles can look down with few misgivings...
...At one point the Second Woman describes how she and her spouse went into overnight partnership with a younger couple...
...When he first sees his father in the play he faints, not because he is afraid but because he is exhausted...
...He puts it on...
...It drives him into a frenzy...
...He sends Iole back to Deianeira and asks her to take care of the girl until he arrives...
...It itches him, burns him, strangles him...
...But the legend itself is a gloriously improbable story, and Lionel Abel has chosen it as the basis for his new play The Wives (at Stage 7 3 ) . The legend has it that soon after Herakles and Deianeira are married, the centaur Nessus runs away with Deianeira and tries to violate her...
...But its idiom is American...
...Whitney J. Oates introduces the wonderfully orotund Jebb translation (in The Complete Greek Drama, 2 vols., Random House, edited by Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr...
...So is the absence of an encounter between Herakles and Deianeira, and so too is Herakles' dying: Instead of sizzling on a mountainside pyre, in accordance with the Heraklean legend, he trots out a few pedestrian words ("The way is hard, but the end/Is consolation") and is borne away by attendants...
...He has preferred to enrich the characters, especially the secondary ones: Iole, who is silent throughout Sophocles' play...
...If Herakles is ever unfaithful to her, she must rub the blood on a garment and make Herakles wear it...
...This demigod comes clean out of mythology, with only one flaw...
...The play is sui generis...
...His Trachiniae has not been stolen nor superseded...
...Pegeen Lawrence's Fourth Woman, on the other hand, is ingenue acting raised to a delicate art...
...Machiz and Meyer are also the joint-producers of The Wives, to their credit...
...Herakles' son Hyllos and his messenger Likhas...
...the late entrance of Herakles on a stretcher, plaintively recalling his ancient exploits, is inescapably a letdown after the play's initial promises...
Vol. 48 • May 1965 • No. 11
