
Aaron Posner and Round House pulled it off.
I couldn’t believe it when the Getty announced they were doing Sophocles’s Philoctetes. It’s impossible to stage. The main character is a loathsome freak, with repeated references to his bad smell. A victim no one likes. The action consists of men lying, whining and arguing. No romance, no humor, and not even the relief of nature poetry. It works up to an impasse that is resolved only by last-minute divine intervention, that leaves you disquieted and suspicious.
The Heal was an imitation rather than a translation. Was there a single line that could be traced back to Sophocles? No matter. It took the themes and issues and expressed them in 21st century language, with a 21st century sensibility. The play Sophocles wrote about a man with a wound that won’t heal expanded into a confrontation with lying politicians, homelessness, refugees, neglected veterans, PTSD, ….
The radical updating meant the evening was free of sententious tragic posing. There were no invocations to gods that nobody believes in. Phil’s agonies were cartoony – eliciting some laughs – rather than sombre Theater of Cruelty rites.
The chorus had nothing to do with the chorus of Sophocles and was the hit of the show. Instead of a gravely attitudinizing pseudo-classical approximation, three seen-it-all Bob Fosse chorus girls danced and declaimed backstory and commentary with delicious acidic wit. E.g. summarizing the Trojan War with hand slapping “Fight, fight, fight! Death, death, death!” And a bump and grind inventory of the bad husbands of Greek mythology.
On the other hand, the update shifted the play from the Tragic to the Theraputic. Injustice and suffering were treated as something to overcome. Instead of divine intervention, The Heal offered honest talking and listening as the way out of an impasse. It affirmed that there are no conflicts without solutions – which is the opposite of the Greek view.
Still, The Heal concluded with everything to be resolved for the characters. They go off together, but to what?