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Published on 5/13/08
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The title character of Sophocles’ 409 B.C. drama is meant to be physically repugnant. Philoktetes is a Greek soldier whose festering foot wound (from a snakebite) became so vilely infected, his comrades, en route to Troy, dumped him on a desert island. When John Jesurun’s play begins, Philoktetes (Louis Cancelmi) has been tracked down by former comrades Odysseus (Will Badgett) and Neoptolemos (Jason Lew), who need his magical bow to win the Trojan War. Their wounded, cave-dwelling friend is understandably embittered—and probably smellier than ever. However, as played by the handsome, mesmeric Cancelmi, Philoktetes’ bodily rot has to be taken on faith.
The actor’s beauty is not writer-director Jesurun’s only instance of poetic license with the myth. He sets his modern version in a minimalist video-mediated dreamscape: three chairs, two large screens and three actors in modern dress standing very still and speaking their trippy text with hypnotic precision. A camera upstage center broadcasts large images overhead. The enchanted bow is represented, I think, by a length of red fabric.
Jesurun is a downtown veteran who has been disorienting audiences with his surreal stage poetry since the ’80s. This Philoktetes was written in 1993 (commissioned by the late Ron Vawter while he was dying of AIDS), and is only now getting its American premiere. The language is intoxicatingly rich, veering from free-associating weirdness to bitchy vituperation, and takes shots at warmongering, disloyalty, body horror, disease and more. The title character’s speeches, like his putrefaction, remain abstract; all the same, they could infect your mind.
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