Loyalty, tragedy, and Heaney at the Yale Rep

By Alexis Soloski

COURTESY YALE REPERTORY THEATER Philocetes caught between a rock and a hard place.

The Cure at Troy, Irish poet Seamus Heaney's lyrical re-working of Sophocles' Philoctetes, presents a paradox. The fifth selection of the Yale Rep's current season, it proves to be both the hardest and the easiest play to watch. After all, Greek tragedy trades in the heartwrenching, and it's painful enough to see a just person brought down by a tragic flaw or heedless action. So imagine the spectacle of a protagonist like Philoctetes: an honorable man whom the gods punish not for hubris or some hamartia, but for decency and obedience.

While on his way to fight at Troy, Philoctetes had stopped to make a sacrifice to Apollo. Hera, angry at Philoctetes' fidelity to Hercules, sent a snake to bite the archer in the foot. Philoctetes' wound eventually grew so repulsive and festering and his cries so agonizing that Odysseus off-loaded him on the deserted island of Lemnos and sailed on without him. And now, after ten years, Odysseus has returned to Lemnos, in the company of Achilles' son Neoptolemus, to trick Philoctetes into surrendering his magical bow and arrows, without which Troy will not fall.

Thus, Philoctetes, the play's hero, appears to the audience after a decade of seclusion, near-starvation, and intractable pain from the wound on his foot. His first lines aren't words, but cries, his costume not clothes, but webs of rags and bandages. One's initial thought may well be (as mine was), "Please, please, please tell me he's not going to scream like that for the next hour and a half. I don't know if I can take it."

One needn't fear. The Cure at Troy is soon transformed from the record of a brutalized man into an exploration of the mysteries of redemption, truth, and the power of human love. This transformation is executed not solely by the stark, unpretentious beauty of Heaney's language, but also by the rich, moving performances of the two lead actors, Luis A Laporte, Jr. and Reg E. Cathey.

As Neoptolemus, Laporte is charged by Odysseus (J. Ed Araiza), to wrest the bow from Philoctetes. The trickster Odysseus instructs Neoptolemus to use half-truths and deceit to get the job done, techniques which are antithetical to Neoptolemus' nature.

By employing these tactics, he successfully commandeers the bow from Cathey's Philoctetes, but experiences a crisis of remorse. For, as Neoptolemus observes, "There's a whole economy of kindness/ Possible in the world; befriend a friend/ And the chance of it's increased and multiplied." Though loyalty to Philoctetes will be interpreted as a betrayal of the Greeks, Neoptolemus cannot bear to desert his newfound friend.

The spectator feels Neoptolemus' dilemma acutely, for Cathey and Laporte quickly establish a very believable bond of amity and mutual respect. Both men possess elegantly expressive, sonorous voices and their speeches convey not only the exquisite poetry of the text, but also a wealth of human emotion underlying the words. Listening to the two men speak provides an unabashed pleasure. The dark-eyed, red-robed female chorus provides a considerable amount of euphony as well.

Unfortunately, seeing the actors rarely proves as satisfying as hearing them. Athough director Liz Diamond elicits some remarkable performances from the leads, she burdens her actors with a sharp and overbearing gestural repertoire and inorganic movement vocabulary. Though Diamond may have crafted this as a nod to the ritualistic aspect of the script, much of it (particularly the chest and thigh-slapping salutes) feels forced.

Furthermore, the set, designed by Louisa Thompson, proffers a vinyl-encased travesty of a desert island. Imagine a rocky outcropping constructed from black Hefty bags and you're nearly there. But perhaps not all the blame ought to be laid at Thompson's door. If a promotional article for the show is correct, Thompson had originally envisioned the set as a large-scale embodiment of a death mask. This vision appears almost nowhere in the finished product, suggesting that substantial, and possibly unwanted, deviations were made from Thompson's initial design.

Not only is it an eyesore, a great rarity for the Rep indeed, but the slick surface and uneven topography make the mound a great, unnecessary challenge for the actors to negotiate. Yet, much to their credit, negotiate it they do.

Though it seems rather misconceived, the set and its concomitant problems do not detract greatly from the overall quality of the production. The conflicts between trickery and honesty, love and duty, vengeance and forgiveness play out with powerful effect. The Cure at Troy may be just the sort of remedy this otherwise mediocre Rep season sorely needs.

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