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An Interview with the Sandy Perlman |
Front & Center
At last, Oedipus' mom gets to tell her side of complex story Sunday, March 04, 2001
By TONY BROWN
PLAIN DEALER THEATER CRITICA funny thing happened on the way to the classics.
When Kent playwright Sandra Perlman reread Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" four or five years ago, she couldn't stop thinking about Jocasta, the mother who becomes wife, tragically, to her own son.
"I went back and there was nothing in my old college notes about her," said Perlman. "She goes off and kills herself and leaves no suicide note once the truth gets out. She had begun to suspect. But one of the rules of Greek society was that women were seen and not heard."
So Perlman, who lives in a different age and place, decided to let the queen of Thebes be heard.
"Jocasta," a two-act play that grew out of the playwright's wonder, will get its world premiere Tuesday in a small production that launches this year's Next Stage Festival of New Plays. The play runs for one week, through next Sunday, in Cleveland Play House's Studio One Theatre.
Carrying on tradition Perlman is just carrying on a tradition that began with the Greeks: retelling an old myth to express a particular slant on the story. That's what Sophocles and countless other playwrights were doing with their versions of the story about the man who was prophesied to kill his dad and sleep with his mom.
"To me, the story is about how parents lie to their children, then the children lie to their children, and there is always a price to pay for all the lying," Perlman said.
"When Oedipus and Jocasta get married, they both decided not to tell the other anything about the past, a lie of omission. If they had told each other anything about the past, they would have figured it all out."
But, notes Perlman, neither of these two particularly wanted to know the truth. Jocasta, for instance, never inquires about her new husband's name, "Oedipus," Greek for "swollen foot." But she knew that when her son was a baby and was taken away to die so he would not live to fulfill the oracle's prediction, his ankles were pierced by a twig so his little body could be hung in a tree.
"She gets in bed with the man, has children by him, but never notices his feet?" Perlman cracked. "Come on."
Act by act Perlman wrote a one-act play and read it to the Playwrights Unit, a group of writers attached to the Play House.
"They liked it OK," Perlman said.
That became Act 2 of her play. She wrote a first act and brought the completed play back to the group.
"This time, they loved it."
Scott Kanoff, then literary manager at the Play House, scheduled that early version of "Jocasta" for a reading by actors in the 1998-99 season's Next Stage Festival. The audience loved it. But Perlman, not satisfied, rewrote Act 2 for the production in this year's festival.
The play has only three characters: Jocasta, her mother and a maidservant. Although it is not set in any particular time, Perlman figures it has to be post-Freud (and therefore, post-Oedipus complex), but pre-1950 (before women's lib). Director Eric Schmiedl has set the new production in 1930s Hollywood, among America's version of royalty.
Act 1, a comedy, is set on the eve of Jocasta's wedding. "Her mother tells Jocasta, This time, you've got to do it right. Don't mention the past," Perlman said. The second act, more serious, is set on the night 10 years later when Jocasta faces the truth.
Rationale for suicide Perlman said it was important to her to find a rationale for Jocasta's suicide.
"In ancient Greek, there were two different words for shame, private and public, and public was much worse," Perlman said. "And the other rule of Greek society, in addition to a woman not being heard, is that you don't speak ill of the dead. So she kills herself to protect her children from public shame. It's an act of courage. I had to find a reason that was courageous. She is not giving up. She is making an opportunity for her kids to have a better life."
When Perlman talked about her play and "Oedipus Rex" with some high school students, they parroted what they had been taught about Greek tragedy.
"Fate!, Fate they all said," Perlman recalled. "So I asked them, OK. What do you do to fight your fate. My answer is, You gotta have the truth."
So have Perlman and her husband, glass blower Henry Halem, always told the truth with each other and their daughter?
"Of course not," Perlman said. "You can't always tell the truth. And that is OK. But we have to understand that there is a consequence to that, for every lie or omission. And the more important the lie, the higher the consequences."
E-mail: tbrown@plaind.com
Phone: 216-999-4181
©2001 THE PLAIN DEALER. Used with permission.
Mother Knows Best
American Theater Magazine
March 2001At last, the Oedipus myth with a feminist slant! Jocasta, the love interest in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, has stepped out of the mythological shadows and taken center stage in Sandra Perlman's Jocasta, premiering this month at the Cleveland Play House.
In Sophocles' play, Oedipus's wife is old enough to be, well, his mother. But in Perlman's version of the tale, the queen is still in her prime (she married her first husband, Laius, at 14). Perlman-a member of the CPH Playwrights Unit-begins her play on the eve of Jocasta's unwitting wedding to her son, a part of the story Sophocles and Euripides ignore. But Jocasta hasn't chosen this marriage. In a man's world, even a queen's life doesn't come with choices her brother Creon has promised Jocasta to whomever frees Thebes from the Sphinx. Nevertheless, Jocasta, whose first marriage was a flop, eagerly anticipates her Oedipal wedding night. She tells her mother: "I find his face quite pleasant, almost familiar. There is a complexity here that both excites and confuses my blood."
Jocasta retains the flavor and feel of Sophocles' tragedies - Perlman convincingly reconstructs the ancient world and the power arrangement between the sexes-even when Jocasta's mother begins to sound like the Betty Friedan of ancient Greece. ("What can any woman do?" she kvetches. "The men come and go as they please. They start a war here, take some land there. They don't ask us.")
Infusing these archetypal characters with a dose of "feminine mystique," Perlman succeeds in giving the play contemporary appeal.
Director Eric Schmiedl gives the production an Art Deco took that straddles antiquity and our own era. Hollywood's Deco influenced films of the 1920s were, the director says, "marked by clean lines and geometric shapes which represented elegance, wealth, power and a sense of antiquity." It is a visual style, he adds, that allows "a modem perspective without losing the integrity and feeling of the original Greek myth." Jocasta runs March 8-10 as part of the Play House's Next Stage Festival of new plays.
-Jesse Bryant Wilder
© Halem Studios
Sandra Perlman 2001
Last update March 2001
