Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses The Hypocrites

3 1/2 Stars - "Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses" is the kind of work that can emerge only when a director has complete freedom from fitting the artistic mission of others or bringing in coin at the box-office. It is one heck of an achievement" - Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 9/15/11

Highly Recommended -  Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 9/12/11

Four Stars - Kris Vire, TimeOut Chicago 9/15/11

#1 Don't Miss Pick this Week - Chicago Magazine 9/7/11.

Top Fifty Shows For Fall  - Chicago Tribune 9/1/11

Critic's Pick:The best of this Fall  - TimeOut Chicago 9/1/11

Tickets - $36.  More information 773-989-7352

 

 



09/06/11 - 10/23/11

7p and 3p (details below)


Previews: 9/6 - 9/10 at 7p.   Opens 9/11 at 3p.   Fri, Sat 7p and Sun 3p until Oct 23.  

Plus: Mon 10/10 at 7p (not 10/1, 10,10)

Tickets - $36.  More information 773-989-7352

3 ½ Stars - All 7 Sophocles dramas make for a crowded emergency room – Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 9/14/11 “When Aristotle immortalized the term hubris, he could well have been talking about Sean Graney, the experimental Chicago theater director who, this fall, decided to adapt and stage not one Sophoclean drama, but all seven at once.


In a Wicker Park basement. In three themed acts ("Honor Lost," "Honor Found" and "Honor Abandoned"). With one company of actors. Using a soundtrack composed entirely of songs by Bruce Springsteen, taken from his album "The River" and performed live by the actors.

The setting for the whole shebang is a kind of warped hospital emergency room, with the swinging entry doors functioning as an equivalent to the famous central doors in Theatre of Dionysus. And did I mention the chorus is represented by a pair of cynical nurses, who've seen it all and stitched up it all?

Let me first lay out my caveats: You will be perched on cushions and hard benches for several hours; these are abbreviated versions of these plays; most of the actors are not great singers; Graney struggles to evoke another of those crucial Aristotelian tragic concepts, known as magnitude. All in all, Graney usually takes a glancing blow rather than staring Sophocles right in the face. And I would say his natural inclination is more Euripidean than Sophoclean.

But, you know, "Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses" is the kind of work that can emerge only when a director has complete freedom from fitting the artistic mission of others or bringing in coin at the box-office. It is one heck of an achievement.


When you go to Greek drama — even at Apollonian-style theaters where they like to specialize in gravitas — you go for revelation. You want to encounter someone's take on these great ancient plays and feel, all at once, their timeless power and their fresh resonance. Graney will, I guarantee, give you gobs of that. And it's not easy to do. His overall sensibility here seems influenced by the late British provocateur Joe Orton ("What the Butler Saw"), who is not the guy who usually comes to mind when you think Sophocles, the most balanced and realistic of the three Greek tragedians whose work has survived. But Graney nonetheless makes his case that the violence, passion and dark comedy that inevitably flows when Greek tragedies are staged today can be fused to strikingly complex yet accessible ends. Why not stick all these characters in a hospital? They're sick and desperate enough. And they love to talk about their blood lines, which makes Graney's flowing tubes of red stuff all the more apropos.

And that's not the only reason for hardy, drama-loving souls toddle on down to the Chopin basement.

Sophocles was known for the power and strength of his women — indeed, he was the first playwright to be known for the power and strength of his woman — and this four-hour performance contains a trio of gripping, gutsy performances from three superb young actresses: Erin Barlow, Tien Doman and Lindsey Gavel. They split up the famous Sophocles roles between them and, throughout the entire duration of the event, they're all on fire.

Barlow's Jocasta is especially fascinating: any good production of "Oedipus" makes you wonder what Jocasta knows and when she found it out, and so it goes here. Similarly, Barlow's Antigone is the kind of determined creature who would terrify any king, especially Zeke Sulkes' hapless Creon. Doman's Dejanira is similarly unstinting, and I found Gavel's feral Elektra to be a fascinating blend of determination and misery. These are formidable performances and they power through this show. Both Sulkes (Creon and Odysseus) and Jeff Trainor (Oedipus and Agamemnon) seem continually terrified of a trio that packs more punch than the witches of "Macbeth" and the angels of Charlie combined. I suspect that was by design.

While "Oedipus," "In Trachis," "In Colonus," "Philoktetes," "Ajax," "Elektra" and "Antigone" does not represent the sum total of the output of the famous Athenian, it does represent the sum total of that which survived the last 2,600 years more or less intact. You can thank the monasteries, and maybe the Irish, for hanging on to the manuscripts. Of those plays, a regular theatergoer can expect, in the course of a few years, to be offered "Oedipus," "Antigone," and "Electra." Maybe, if you willing to travel to some festivals, an "In Colonus." But outside the groves of Academe, the chance to see "In Trachis" or "Philoktetes" are rare indeed. Graney should try and publish his adaptations; the rakish "Seven Sicknesses" would be a boon to many colleges.

In Chicago, it's worth a sore bottom and a pain in the neck from peering around the columns that pockmark this provocative space (once the home of David Cromer's "Our Town"). Graney's wicked sense of humor adds a delicious element that is laudably in concert with the entire conceit: there's an amusing metadramatic aspect to the character, played by Maximillian Lapine, whom Graney calls Carrier and whose messages invariably prefigure disease or distress. (Graney really does make his hospital metaphor work remarkably well).

At one point, Nurse A (Sarah Jackson) and Nurse B (Shannon Matesky) leave their stations for a moment, only to find that their operating theater has been filled with more blood, violence and broken souls.
"You're gone for five minutes …" observes one of the nurses, dryly, avoiding the temptation to curse”.



Highly Recommended - Hypocrite’s magnificent ‘Seven’ a triumph for Graney - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 9/12/11. "One of the many surprising things about director Sean Graney’s “Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses” — his altogether fascinating and original interpretation of the surviving tragedies by the seminal force in ancient Greek theater (and most all of Western theater that followed) — is how often he and his actors make the audience laugh.

To be sure, much of the laughter in this epic production by The Hypocrites is blackly comic — an acknowledgment of the colossally demented mess human beings make of things, whether political or personal. It is laughter in the face of monumental violence, selfishness, lies, betrayals, egotism, envy, lost honor, an unending cycle of carnage and revenge, and a general madness, especially in wartime. It is the laughter of self-awareness and compulsion. It is the laughter that comes when the horrors just keep piling up, and the maniacal absurdity of it all seems unstoppable. And it is laughter (and attitude) that could not be more hip, contemporary or, as the title suggests, “sick.”

Graney’s intensely visceral adaptation, which runs about three hours and 40 minutes including a dinner break and intermissions, is bookended by Sophocles’ most familiar plays — beginning with “Oedipus the King” (that tale of a plague-ridden kingdom led by an incestuous royal family), and ending with both “Elektra” (set in the wake of the Trojan War, when the title character seeks revenge on her mother, Clytemnestra, who has murdered her adulterous husband, the general Agamemnon), and “Antigone” (which captures the very different personalities and fates of Oedipus’ grown daughters, Antigone and Ismene). In between, there are the tales of Dejanira, who murders her unfaithful husband, the heroic Herakles, and then commits suicide; the tale of Philoktetes, the Greek hero treated shabbily by the arrogant Odysseus; and the story of Ajax, the exceptional warrior who, in a distraught moment, savagely murders a flock of sheep, believing they are his enemies.

Graney’s cast of a dozen actors is exceptional as they bring impressively different physical and emotional colors to multiple roles and wail out Kevin O’Donnell’s ballads. Erin Barlow, Tien Doman and Lindsey Gave are stunning in all the female roles, with Jeff Trainor, Zeke Sulkes, Geoff Button, Walter Briggs, Robert McLean, Ryan Bourque and Maximillian Lapine as the embattled men. Sarah Jackson and Shannon Matesky nail every punchline as the traditional Greek chorus which here takes the form of two very sassy Red Cross nurses who matter-of-factly amputate limbs and swab the bloody stage floor of the hospital set designed by Tom Burch and Maria Defabo. That stage rises above Aegean-style turquoise and white tile banquette seating for the audience.

In his recent one-man show, “Long Story Short,” Colin Quinn quipped that “Greek theater was invented as a way to say bad things about people in front of their backs, instead of behind them.” He would certainly get a kick out of “Seven Sicknesses,” a production that also should be required viewing for every high school and university class about Greek theater. But of course Graney would be the last person to “require” anything.

NOTE: Part of the whole event (and ticket price) is a tasty vegetarian dinner from the Sultan’s Market served in the lobby of the theater after Part I".



4 stars - Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses at the Hypocrites – Kris Vire, TimeOut Chicago 9/14/11
“Sean Graney’s been distilling and deconstructing classic texts for a decade and a half with the Hypocrites (and, more recently, with tonier outfits such as Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Court Theatre and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival). His adaptational approach might be described as an indifference to language and context but with a consummate reverence for theme. That’s certainly the case in his remarkably effective riff on Sophocles’ seven surviving plays. In the opening playlet, Creon (Zeke Sulkes) asks Oedipus (Jeff Trainor), “Are you, like, banishing me?”

The setting, as indicated by Tom Burch and Maria DeFabo’s alley layout in the Chopin’s basement, is a sort of clinic, with a pair of nurses (Shannon Matesky and Sarah Jackson) serving as Greek chorus. They attempt to treat—or at least clean up after, or maybe just watch like a soap opera—the sicknesses of Graney’s title: the plagues and curses in Sophocles’ renderings of Theban tragedy and Trojan war, but also war itself, and the revenge, power, corruption and betrayals of trust that fuel it.
A phenomenal 12-person ensemble enacts Graney’s mammoth, modern take (permeated by snippets of songs from Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 lamentation The River, sung by the actors to new arrangements by Kevin O’Donnell). As the plays stack up during the nearly four-hour evening—some wryly humorous, others gut-wrenching, nearly all filled with gory bloodletting—we begin to sense a through-line. As went Sophocles’ ancient Greeks, fueled by vengeance, vanity and misguided ideas of honor, so go nations today. At the play’s end, with the stage riddled with the bodies of the needlessly dead, the more naive nurse asks, “Is that it?” “Nope,” says the other. “There’ll be more.”



Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses – Monica Westin, NewCity Chicago 9/13/11
“It feels almost beside the point to note that, in turning Sophocles’ seven surviving plays into a four-hour theatrical event (with dinner), some elements are going to get edited out or lost. Each of the plays has been compressed to half an hour or less, so that the tension inherent in, say, the dramatic irony of Oedipus’ self-delusion, never builds over enough time for it to be unbearable for the audience, as with the Hypocrites’ 2009 adaptation of the play. And the most common critique volleyed at writer-director Sean Graney—that he butchers literature to make entertaining theater—could certainly be applied here, for Graney’s trademark high and low language is out in full force, modernizing the stories and adding in comedy at every turn.


But none of this seems to matter in the least during the show. I’m a self-admitted fan of the theater company, but this is by far the most ambitious Hypocrites play I’ve seen, and one of a few that have seemed utterly necessary in retrospect. What Graney and the unbelievably talented cast have done here far outweighs liberties with the script (and maybe this won’t sound like a massive success, but it’s rare in my experience): They’ve made every single one of the often alien, hyperbolic characters of Sophocles utterly human, where these plays so often feel disconnected from our experience of character and emotion. Because it’s The Hypocrites, “Seven Sicknesses” is funny, and it’s hip, and it’s technically gorgeous and flashy; but the adaptation has added profound substance. It’s not that the show just psychologizes the characters; it makes them relatable, epic in the Brechtian sense—and thereby epic in every sense of the word.

The seven acts in three parts take place in a modern hospital, where the sickness of the house of Atreus and the ills of war are a perennial theme, and two deadpan nurses provide much-needed comic relief as a half-shellshocked, half-blasé chorus. The play is structured so that while the ensemble permutates between ever-shifting characters, strengthening the sense of cyclical fate, certain characters, like King Creon, appear over and over, stabilizing the story so that it begins to resemble a kind of bloodbath-filled “Twin Peaks.” Seeing Antigone, for example, develop from a traumatized girl in the first act to a woman burying her brother in the final scene gives her story its true sense of sustained, lifelong pain missing in individual productions.


There’s plenty of stomach-turning violence (first-row audiences have the chance of getting splattered in fake blood), dark humor and musical interludes (all songs come from Bruce Springsteen’s album “The River,” which somehow works perfectly here) to keep the energy well-paced as the bodycount rises. The actors are all-in, with uncompromising performances that constantly turn on a dime. But beyond the blood and gore, one-liners about suicide, and great fight scenes, there’s tremendous victory in this production”.

THE TIES THAT BIND — ‘SOPHOCLES: SEVEN SICKNESSES’ – Johnny Oleksinski, www.Podunkcritic.com
“Disrespectful.” “Lacking grandeur.” “Midwestern.”

Listening to intermission chatter is always a riot, not to mention a unique learning opportunity for a theatergoer. Lobbies become limbos of corroded expectation and loudmouthed brainiac assertions; factoid minefields. So, what is it? Is Greek a genre, style, both, or neither? Well, first and foremost, it’s delicious. But all saganaki aside… What truly characterizes Greek theatre? A seasoned gentlemen seated on the plush couch to my right in the Chopin’s eclectic basement lounge believed grandeur to be a key player. Eh, kinda. What is grand to us size-wize was par-for-the-course in ancient Athens. And as for the perceived formal grandeur of Ancient Greek, much is lost in time and translation. British people certainly sound formal, but have you ever had dinner with one? Better know your favourite football club… So those are all legitimate, I daresay, commonplace conceptions as to what Greek theatre is all about…

…But The Hypocrites get them there Greeks a whole lot better than any Mr. Moneybags regional theatre or grossly overpriced textbook. This innovative company knows that, at its core, Greek theatre is a reflection of community, togetherness, and culture. With Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses, director Sean Graney has adapted and conceptualized the remaining seven texts of (you guessed it) Sophocles, and given them voice for our community, our culture, our heartbeat.

Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses is a work of staggering conceptual scope (including Oedipus, In Trachis, In Colonus, Philoktetes, Ajax, Elektra, and Antigone), running  about four hours, yet someway, somehow it is more intimate and more inclusive than my primordial cave-like studio apartment. Graney, his cast and crew go out of their way to cultivate a warm, familial environment for their audience, and it is absolutely integral and vital to the success of this production. Seems a teensy bit strange to feel enveloped by waves of group positivity, feel good vibes, and a communal meal as you observe a woman’s esophageal lining become acquainted with the acidic burn of bleach… But then again, I imagine you have, at some point in your life, watched a horror movie with friends. Greek theatre should be kind of like a horror movie. Skream

And this horror movie is most definitely a Chicago-based horror movie. It takes place in a hospital. Like Chicago Hope and ER, these tiled floors see a whole lot of blood, saliva, vomit, dirt, sickness, and any number of other unpalatable yucky messes, but they always get mopped up. Greece always rebuilds. Thanks to two saucy nurse-chorus members played with eye-roll-larity by Sarah Jackson and Shannon Matesky. The entire company of actors is completely in-tune and fantastically transformative. Character changes  happen seamlessly, and the performances are uniformly vibrant. Tien Doman’s portrayal of Denjanira, the tragic wife of Heracles, brings new life to a text that is given the cold shoulder far too often. Same goes for Walter Briggs’ sexually-charged, powerful Ajax.

The design team beautifully imposes story and personality onto a sterile hospital scene. The colors of Tom Burch and Maria Defabo’s runway stage are stark white, robin’s egg blue, and sickly green, evoking not the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean’s subterranean underbelly. Jared Moore’s lighting design burns lasting images into your retinas, and Stephen Ptacek’s sound design marries oddly, and chillingly well with the godly rumble of the Red Line below.

The real star is Sean Graney’s unpredictable adaptation. Graney’s whipsmart dialogue zigzags between the colloquial (“Like, ya know”) and the formal (“plow her fields”) , often using abrupt shifts to make light of the overblown tragedy playing out before us. There is a clever, invisible purpose behind the jawdroppingly funny humor though, and that is the genius of this compilation.

Audiences today cannot sob together. Nope. We’re just too scared. We have been woefully, yet successfully conditioned to stifle honest tears, and if you’re anything like me, you actually consider getting measly watery eyes to be full-on “crying”.

But we sure do love to laugh, don’t we? Laughing has got to be one of the few universal human constants; one of the few ‘Ties That Bind’ (the first track of Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” from which the evening’s music is mined from). Here the tragic is symbiotically bound to the comic, achieving a modern equivalent to the original Greek audience’s response. Pretty damn cool. The performance I attended was chocked full of critics and Jeff Award voters. Not exactly a rowdy, happenin’ bunch, but you’d never know that from the roars. Graney’s text and the ensemble’s quirks are so bellysmackin’ funny that as you watch the play…on a couch…spattered by blood, your neighbor becomes your friend. A lovely and all too infrequent sensation.

For a production to captivate an audience for even ten minutes is a sadly reserved luxury in today’s theatrical climate. But for an entire hour, the climactic end of Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses grabs you by the jugular, beckoning you forward without option. That being said, the pleasures and sensations brought forth by Sophocles are more akin to those achieved through sadomasochism than through your run-of-the-mill “wah! wah! wah!” production of Antigone. This creative team has a paddle, a whip and a ball-gag, and the safe word is ‘Sickness’. The slap-in-the-face final sixty minutes of Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses solidifies The Hypocrites’ season opener as the theatrical event of flu season.


This show is good/bad because [fill in the blank].

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own distinct opinion (well, other than Ann Coulter…), but what really struck me during the first intermission of The Hypocrites’ Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses (currently running at the Chopin Theatre) was the depth of the audience commentary. Folks were really confused, and considering we were all stuffing our faces with yummy vegan eatables, they were downright befuddled. They all knew what a Greek play was, and yet they had no idea what they were watching"

 

#1 Don't Miss Pick this Week - Chicago Magazine 9/7/11.  "Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses.  Sean Graney wraps his tenure as the Hypocrites’ founding artistic director with a larger-than-life flourish: a four-hour adaptation of Sophocles’s entire dramatic catalog. Together Ajax, Antigone, Ian Trachis, Oedipus the King, Elektra, Philoktetes, and Oedipus at Colonus add up to a matricide-, patricide-, suicide-, and fratricide-riddled epic of incest, oracles, and monsters. Talk about going out with a bang"

 

Top Fifty Shows For Fall  - Chicago Tribune 9/1/11

Critic's Pick:The best of this Fall  - TimeOut Chicago 9/1/11

 

Author
Sophocles

Director
Sean Graney

Performers
Erin Barlow, Ryan Bourque, Walter Briggs, Geoff Button, Tien Doman, Lindsey Gavel, Sarah Jackson, Maximillian Lapine, Shannon Matesky, Robert McLean, Zeke Sulkes & Jeff Trainor

Production
Miranda Anderson (stage manager); Kevin O' Donnell (musical director), Stephen Ptacek (sound designer); Tom Burch & Maria DeFabo (scenic designer); Alison Siple (costume designer); Jared Moore (lighting designer); Maria DeFabo (properties designer); Ryan Bourque (fight choreographer) Mary Williamson & Christine Conley (make-up/gore design); Kristina Herne (mask design)

Tags: Theater, American, Old Europe, 2011