[Home Page] [About Jocasta] [Jocasta, an excerpt] [Guide to Plays] [Back to Plain Dealer Interview]
Read a review of Jocasta as published in the Akron Beacon Journal ] [Review Monterey Herald]
|
|
Friday, March 09, 2001
By TONY BROWN
PLAIN DEALER THEATER CRITIC
Two psychiatrists go to the opera. The shrieking heroine, the only character left alive on stage, readies a dagger to off herself. One of the shrinks leans over and says, "With a little professional help early on, this all could have been avoided."
It's an old joke, but its grain of truth provides plenty of fodder for post-Freudian writers who re-examine the old stories in the light of psychoanalysis.
"Jocasta," Kent playwright Sandra Perlman′s often fascinating, often funny, through-the-looking-glass look at Sophocles’ "Oedipus Rex," this week launches Cleveland Play House′s annual Next Stage Festival of New Plays in fine style.
The handsome, smart, world-premiere production, though small and short (it ends Sunday; you'll be lucky to get a seat in the 110-seat Studio One Theatre), boasts two very good acting performances and a spectacular one.
Perlman′s choice of myth is especially apt. The story, fraught with psychological implications, lends its name to the Oedipus complex, the most well-known Freudian diagnosis. Look back at "Oedipus Rex" and you find it staring right back at you, way ahead of its time, psychoanalytically speaking.
But Perlman, like so many playwrights before her (even Sophocles was borrowing the story), has her own spin. She wonders what was going on with the mother/wife instead of the son/husband. Perlman′s suggested answer could be dubbed the "Jocasta complex," a willful ignorance of stark reality.
Like the psychiatrists at the opera, Perlman posits that the tragedy could have been avoided if these people had only talked.
In Act 1, we find Ismene, Jocasta’s mother, advising her daughter on the eve of her wedding to Oedipus not to tell her new husband anything about her previous marriage, the son who was taken away to die, that terrible prophesy. It's comedy with terrible implications. Ismene makes this casual, hilarious and horrific remark about Oedipus: "I'm old enough to be his grandmother."
After the intermission, a decade later, with Ismene dead and Jocasta now aware that ignorance has ruined her, the Theban queen discovers that her woman-in-waiting, Iris, has also participated in this festival of self-deception, compounding the hurt.
Although "Jocasta" is not set in any particular time, with ancient references left intact but the language modern, director Eric Schmiedl uses a 1930s Hollywood motif to drive home a post-Freudian, pre-feminist sensibility. Schmiedl′s sometimes hyper- active direction - do these characters ever sit still? - is calmed by set designer Michael Roesch′s elegant, classically proportioned art deco bedroom.
Dark and ebullient Laura Perrotta, sensually sheathed in satin slips but bearing the scars of a veteran wife and mother, plays Jocasta with a hauteur that is easily and often punctured. Erin Hurley′s Iris has a sheen of naivete and sexual repression.
As fine as these performances are, they are overshadowed by Catherine Albers′ in the most complexly drawn character, Jocasta′s charmingly irritating, lovingly manipulative mom. Rather than being a glacier, Albers chooses to be a self-absorbed and histrionic sliver of ice, always ready to dart in, quickly numb her victim, do her damage, and withdraw again. She is the queen mother of denial.
The play suffers when Perlman occasionally gives in to the temptation to tut-tut; good shrinks (and playwrights) just nod. And why did costume designer Charlotte Yetman make such a beautiful wedding gown only to plague it with a mondo case of visible panty lines?
Distractions aside, "Jocasta" fascinates us with reiteration of a timeless question: "Can we talk?"
© Halem Studios
Sandra Perlman 2001
Last update March 2001