“Oedipus at Colonus” was Sophocles’ last play, his love song to Periclean Athens. Written in the closing years of the fifth century B.C., when Athens was losing the Peloponnesian War, it comes after “Oedipus the King” in the chronology of the Oedipus story, and before “Antigone.” According to David Greene, who co-edited the University of Chicago series that now publishes Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the play—the one used in “The Gospel at Colonus,” currently being revived at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater—“Antigone” was first produced around 441 B.C., “Oedipus the King” some fifteen years later, and “Oedipus at Colonus,” posthumously, in 404, the year after the destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami.
The action of the play revolves around an oracle’s pronouncement that whatever city Oedipus chooses for his final resting place shall be blessed—divinely protected. When the play opens, news of this prophecy has got around, so that, after many years of wandering with only Antigone (and occasionally her sister Ismene) to guide and comfort him, the old, blind beggar Oedipus, arriving at Colonus, finds himself suddenly very much sought after. Creon, the King of Thebes, wants him because the city is under attack by Polynices, one of Oedipus’s sons; Polynices needs him for victory in the coming battle with Eteocles, his brother.
There is no moral position stronger than to be suddenly wanted by those who have treated you badly, and the expression of righteous anger was Sophocles’ forte. “Oedipus at Colonus” provides a real field day for moral-indignation buffs: it gives Oedipus a chance to vent his spleen on just about everyone who has ever given him a hard time—from an officious stranger to smug Creon, lording it over the House of Labdacus for all those years, and his own son Polynices, who, with his brother,, had left reverence and filial piety to the girls. Oedipus tells them all exactly where they get off. The play is full of great speeches and confrontations, great rage and bitterness: Sophocles was having troubles with his own sons, who had hauled him into court on a charge of mental incompetence hoping to gain control of his land. But he himself was old now thinking an old man’s thoughts, and the play also contains some of the most beautiful choral odes in tragedy: the meditation on age, death, and suffering (“Though he has watched a decent age pass by, A man will sometimes still desire the world”), and—even lovelier—the hymn to Athens and Attica (“the land beloved of horsemen, fair Colonus takes a guest”). Colonus, outside Athens, was Sophocles’ home town, and it was the recitation of this newly penned ode before his judges that is said to have won him unanimous acquittal.
The production at the Lunt-Fontanne is essentially the same one that was seen by audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983 and broadcast on PBS in 1985. Isabell Monk plays Antigone, as she did in the original production, and Morgan Freeman narrates the role of Oedipus, in the person of a Pentecostal preacher—for as everyone will by now have heard, the show takes certain liberties with the play. Conceived and directed by Lee Breuer, with music by Bob Telson, “The Gospel at Colonus” is Sophocles’ play recast as a black gospel service. Each of the roles is both spoken and sung, narrated and acted out—in most cases by more than one person. Thus, Oedipus’ part in the story is sometimes told by Mr. Freeman and sometimes sung by Clarence Fountain backed up by the five Blind Boys of Alabama. Occasionally, J.J. Farley and his blue-suited Soul Stirrers attend the five white-suited Blind Boys like a private chorus. Robert Earl Jones plays Creon wearing a mobster’s white overcoat; Kevin Davis, full of sullen anger and bitterness, plays Polynices dressed largely in leather; the “Ode to Man” from “Antigone” is sung by the J.D. Steele Singers; Rev. Earl F. Miller performs the messenger speech like a call-and-response sermon; and Martin Jacox acts as Choragos, wailing on an electric guitar. Meanwhile, a full gospel choir, ebulliently led by Mr. Steele, and seated throughout on the scaffolding of Alison Yerxa’s set, performs Mr. Telson’s gospel settings for the choral odes, occasionally crying out responses as Mr. Freeman reads from what he calls “The Book of Oedipus.”
The idea of superimposing Christian values on “Oedipus at Colonus” is both clever and problematic. Lee Breuer is not the first to notice the presence in the play of certain proto-Christian themes: sin and salvation, suffering and redemption, expiation and a spirit of divine grace that blows where it lists. Some of what is heard or seen toward the end of the play might even remind one of resurrection, rebirth, and life everlasting. Still, the only thing promised “for all time to come” is divine protection for Athens, and it is contingent on Oedipus’ being dead: his bones have to be lying there in Athenian soil.
What happens at the end of “Oedipus at Colonus” and what sort of godhead, if any, Oedipus has been accorded are subjects of scholarly debate, but the Breuer version is unequivocal. At the end of the evening, Mr. Freeman, vocally accompanied by Mr. Fountain and the Five Blind Boys (and by much sobbing and lamentation) makes his way ceremoniously up a flight of stairs toward a doorway gleaming with dry-ice mystery and light. And when he does it’s a dead cert that no one at the Lunt-Fontanne is thinking of the House of Labdacus.
“The Gospel at Colonus” is probably at its best on the symbolic level—where characters onstage become archetypal figures, embodying certain passions and predicaments. It’s the level at which theater becomes an occasion for hearing great poetry beautifully rendered. Listening to the rise and fall of Mr. Freeman’s voice as he recites a choral ode, listening to Miss Monk’s cadences and watching the shades of abstract virtues that cross her face—patience, devotion, generosity—you find yourself wondering what it would be like to see them perform Shakespeare, and, in wondering this, realize that a lack of music and oratory in the schooling of white American speech must account for half our inadequacy in performing the classics. The other half can be put down to the inability of so many Method-trained actors to project anything other than feeling.
Miss Monk and Mr. Freeman know how to do more than emote, can actually hold an audience spellbound in the grip of someone else’s words. The style of the production, too—mixing drama and narrative—is useful in suggesting, if now how tragedy was performed in the fifth century, at least something about how it may have been received. The chorus that spoke in the voice of one but had the body of many was there, after all, to get caught up in the drama and help tell the story. Even the device of having Oedipus played by seven men has the effect of emphasizing his magnitude and universality. And, of course, there’s the music—more witty than stirring in the first half, and more stirring than funny in the second, though there’s humor on both sides of the interval.
Where the “Gospel at Colonus” fails is at the axis at which theater is supposed to make us care about the commerce between specific individuals. “Oedipus at Colonus” presents a great cast of characters, all of whom have a good deal to say (most of it of a very complex nature) about the fate of Oedipus. The text presented at the Lunt-Fontanne is cut to shreds: it’s “Oedipus at Colonus” with most of the dialogue left out, lines, odes, and speeches reassigned and transposed—sometimes from other plays—and only enough bits of the long speeches left in for the story to hold its shape. Not once in the course of the evening are we stirred by a confrontation: at times the figures that pace the stage might be almost anyone.
Lee Breuer’s version of “Oedipus at Colonus” conveys neither the moral issues at stake in the situation that the play proposes nor anything of its drama. But so what? “The Gospel at Colonus” isn’t about theater or the values of fifth-century Athens; it’s about American values—specifically, black culture and black music. Moreover, there is a sense in which Sophocles’ play isn’t really about Oedipus, either, a point at which its hero stops being simply Oedipus and becomes Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War: like Oedipus, tired and beleaguered, ragged and set upon from all sides, an unwilling suppliant to her moral inferiors. To Athenians watching the play in the twilight of the Periclean era, Oedipus the achiever, the self-made king and solver of incomprehensible riddles, must have represented all the Athenian virtues.
Just as it is possible for a contemporary audience to feel touched by Oedipus, if not for his own sake, then for that of the ghost of Athens, it ought to be possible for a purist to be moved by “The Gospel at Colonus.” The tradition of gospel music and the values it upholds—the importance of church and family—are as threatened today as war-torn Athens was. Athens held out until the very last moment: even after that decisive naval disaster, she endured siege and famine, fighting on like one of Sophocles’ stubborn heroes, and didn’t surrender until 404, the year after Sophocles died. In equating blind Oedipus with the black musician trying to make his way in a predominantly white world, in moving us all to stomp and clap, “The Gospel at Colonus” may not promote an understanding of Sophocles but it keeps faith in spirit with the culture that produced him.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 4, 1988