Coppola and Stauffer breathe life into Racine

Tracy Coppola, SY '98, shows a lot of guts in taking on the title role of Racine's Phaedra for her senior project. It's a notoriously difficult part, demanding Hamlet's blend of restraint and passion as well as a willingness to comply with the formalism of 17th-century French tragedy. Coppola pulls it off, showing a sensitivity to Racine's constrained style and an inventiveness that only rarely slips into ostentation. As a showcase for the actor's talent, Phaedra succeeds.

PATRICK MCGARVEY 'Phaedra' provides incestuous drama without sauce.

Which isn't to say that Phaedra succeeds as a show. Despite Coppola's acting and Elenna Stauffer's, TD '98, skillful directing, the play smothers its audience with long-winded speeches and a narrative whose most exciting events take place offstage. The blame lies not with the production but with a conception of theatrical propriety that is alien to contemporary tastes.

Writing in the time of Louis XIV, Racine was committed to standards of decorum that prevented him from showing any onstage violence and precluded even the faintest hints of vulgarity. In a modern production, the viewer finds himself longing for the duels, punning, folklore, and scatological humor that spice up Shakespearean tragedy.

But beneath its antiseptic coating, Phaedra has a twisted core of tensions. A little more than halfway through the production, one character yells at another, "Incest! Adultery! Are these still your themes?" They are indeed. Add slander, filial anxiety, and the irreversible moment of fate, and you gather most of what fuels the plot for its unforgiving two hours and fifteen minutes.

Closely based on a tragedy by Euripides, the play follows the course of Phaedra's unrequited passion for her stepson, Hippolytus (Ian Robertson, DC '01). A false rumor circulates that her husband, Theseus, the king of Athens (James Waldinger, BR '01), has died on an adventure. Phaedra musters the resolve to tell Hippolytus that she loves him, only to be repulsed by her stepson--although he and Phaedra share no blood, her desire is still considered incestuous. When Theseus returns, Phaedra's nurse, Oenone, superbly performed by Leslie Klug, DC '00, tells him that Hippolytus has made advances on his wife. By now Phaedra has learned that Hippolytus loves Aricia, the dispossessed princess of Athens (Roya Shanks, PC '00). Crazy with jealousy and shame, she corroborates Oenone's story and incites Theseus to pray for vengeance on Hippolytus. Vengeance is had (offstage), Phaedra confesses and dies, and Theseus crowns Aricia the princess of Athens.

The staging of this last event demonstrates the thought that Stauffer has put into her direction. Theseus stands behind Aricia, both characters facing forward, and silently lowers the crown onto her head. The staging here mimics a scene early in the first act in which Phaedra and Oenone, having just heard that Theseus is dead, plot to prevent Aricia's rise to power. Oenone stands behind Phaedra and grips her shoulders; the two characters fill the same spot that Theseus and Aricia occupy at the close of the play. Stauffer stages a careful and clever symmetry here--one that doesn't appear in Racine's text--between Phaedra's destructive scheming and Aricia's order-restoring coronation.

Stauffer, along with costume designer Caitlin Wheeler, SM '00, also deserves credit for the deft manipulation of Phaedra's clothing. Phaedra begins the play in a black dress complexly girdled with a purple sash. This tight wrapping is a fitting token of Phaedra's bridled desires. After deciding to reveal her ruinous love, she appears throughout the rest of the play with the sash worn loose, falling to her feet in sensuous folds.

Theseus's entrance is another tribute to Stauffer's ingenuity. The back of the stage is set against the giant front doors of Dwight Hall Chapel. Late in Act I, the doors fly open, and Theseus stomps onto the stage. It's Phaedra's most invigorating moment. Theseus's opening lines, shouted with the necessary mix of arrogance and grandeur, enliven one of the slower parts of the evening. Just as importantly, the opening of the doors brings in a blast of cold air, and the refreshing effect emphasizes just how stifling the atmosphere of repression has become.

As resourceful as it is, Stauffer's directing can do nothing for writing that often sounds more like filler for creepy valentines than the expression of forbidden love. As Phaedra, Coppola does an extraordinary job of building a simultaneously sympathetic and threatening persona around lines such as, "Blood rushes to my heart; I'm weak. I cannot think of words to speak." Coppola's disciplined voice makes her one of the few actors who never loses a phrase to the echoes of Dwight Hall's vaulted ceiling.

Just as Phaedra's costumes reflect the characters' developments, the play's simple stage design by Peter Haas, SY '98, resonates with the larger themes of the production. It's a stilted play, and appropriately enough, Haas places the stage on stilts. Three tiers of unadorned platforms create a space that sets the actors at an unapproachable distance. It's a strategy that promotes the estranging effects of a play whose concerns and style are often incurably remote.

Coppola, Stauffer, and everyone else involved with this carefully-handled production show an admirable resolve in not trying to gussy-up the play in order to make it more appealing and familiar to a modern audience. It's unfortunate, however, that the alien quality of Phaedra brings not the shock of the stage but the stagnancy of the sterile.

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