A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations). Pershing Square Signature Center (see Off Broadway). By Sam Shepard. Directed by Nancy Meckler. With Stephen Rea. Running time: 1hr 25mins. No intermission.
A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations): In brief
Signature teams up with Ireland's Field Day Theatre Company to present the American debut of Sam Shepard's fractured modern take on the Oedipus myth, directed by Nancy Meckler. Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) plays the complex motherfucker at the center of the story.
A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations): Theater review by David Cote
King Oedipus brings about his tragic fall by demanding to know his parentage—which ultimately reveals him to be an incestuous patricide. Taking that as a cue, I wish I hadn’t known what engendered Sam Shepard’s A Particle of Dread, but there it is, right in the subtitle: Oedipus Variations. A fractured, honky-tonk retelling of the Greek myth, this Irish import shows Stephen Rea taking a valiant stab at a text that spins its wheels in the sand.
This Shepardian gloss switches between two tracks: a vaguely mythic past (Irish accents, poetic speeches) and an American present (Southwestern drawls, highway murders). Rea appears in both scenarios, first as swollen-footed Oedipus trying to stop the plague ravaging his city, then later as wheelchair-bound Otto, who’s drawn to a crime scene in the desert. Both men, we eventually learn, were abandoned as babies and went on to avenge themselves on their fathers. These revelations are partly brought to light by a police officer (Jason Kolotouros) and a dogged forensic investigator (Matthew Rauch). Between the monologues and brief scenes, a cellist and a guitarist provide transitional twanging. Nancy Meckler stages (too woodenly) the bloody goings-on in a tiled room that smacks of shower and abattoir.
Shepard is no stranger to the theme of murderous sons and monstrous dads, but he’s handled it more powerfully in the better parts of his career. Cryptic, creaky and monotonous, Particle suggests Cormac McCarthy rewriting Sophocles on a very bad day. Rea is a keen, intensely present actor who deserves better: Conor McPherson, O’Casey or—since his American accent is so good—any pre-1985 Shepard.—Theater review by David Cote
THE BOTTOM LINE Greek tragedy goes West and croaks in the desert.
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