Tuesday Evening on the Lower East Side: American Thymele Theatre's NYC Euripides Summer Festival presents Euripides' "Children of Hercules" at the East River Park Amphitheater

This evening we saw an intriguing and well-acted performance of Euripides' rarely-staged Children of Hercules, presented at the East River Park Bandshell by American Thymele Theatre as part of its NYC Euripides Summer Festival.

Directed by the company's founder and producing artistic director Stephen Diacrussi, this production proved a thoughtfully entertaining and coherent interpretation of an episodic and somewhat puzzling play, clarifying it as not just a conventional exercise in Athenian patriotism but as a meditation on the relationship of gender, age and political authority.

The individual performances -- particularly that of Michael Raimondi as the aged, infirm Iolaus, relative of the dead Hercules and protector of his children, now hunted refugees -- serve the production well, and the rather disjointed plot strands (probably caused by scenes written by Euripides but missing from the text) somehow work together here so that Children of Hercules is both exciting and relevant.

In its 2,440-year history this is just the second staging of Children of Hercules ever in America and the first professional staging in the English language using an ancient, traditional approach. The shortest of all existing Euripides tragedies, Children of Hercules is a play in praise of the city of Athens, which serves as a place of refuge for Hercules' children, now targeted to be killed by their father's rival.

The play begins at the altar of Zeus at Marathon. The herald Copreus, in the employ of King Eurystheus of Mycenae, attempts to seize the children of Herakles, together with Herakles's old friend, Iolaus. When King Demophon, son of Theseus, insists that Iolaus and Herakles's children are under his protection, Copreus (a snarling and scary Stephen Powell) threatens to return with an army.

Demophon (played as a noble ruler by Todd MacIntyre) is prepared to protect the children even at the cost of fighting a war against Eurystheus, but after consulting the oracles, he learns that the Athenians will be victorious only if they sacrifice a maiden of noble birth to Persephone. Demophon tells Iolaus that as much as he would like to help, he will not sacrifice his own child or force any of the Athenians to do so. Iolaus, realizing that he and the children will have to leave Athens and seek refuge elsewhere, despairs.

A citizen of Marathon (David Bushman is the Coryphaeus) leads a chorus of six other citizens who comment on the action, offer support to Iolaus and Hercules’ children, and provide counsel to their king Demophon. Later, they will dance and sing in celebration of a military victory, praising a world where nobility and excellence triumph.

When Macaria (Tara Bancroft), a older daughter of Hercules, hears about the oracle's pronouncement and realizes her family's predicament, she offers herself as the victim, refusing a lottery. Bidding farewell to her siblings and to Iolaus, she leaves to be sacrificed.

At the same time, Hyllus, Hercules’ oldest son, arrives with reinforcements offstage, as reported by one of his men. Although Iolaus is old and feeble, he insists on going out to the battle. Once there, he miraculously regains his youth and captures Eurystheus. A debate about executing him follows. Alcmena, Hercules's aged mother, brought out by her attendant, catalogs all the wrongs he has done against her family, says she wishes she could herself kill Eurystheus twice, and insists that he be executed right away – although such an execution of a prisoner of war is against Athenian law.

Finally, Eurystheus tells them a prophecy of how his spirit will protect the city from the descendants of Hercules's children if they slay and bury him, and so it is done.

One of the things that struck us as odd is that usually Iolaus is described as Hercules' nephew and younger than Hercules, but here Iolaus is a lame old man, seemingly about the same age as elderly Alcmena, who is his grandmother. But anyway, there are repeated, similar references to each one's age and their loss of power and status -- miraculously regained by Iolaus in battle offstage, and in a more symbolic way, by Alcmena, when her wrath becomes the focus of the play's denouement.

The fiery Alcmena, played with regal gusto by Diana Swinburne, is a marked contrast to her demure, dignified self-sacrificing granddaughter Macaria. She also berates the chorus of citizens for not listening to her bloody plans to kill Eurystheus and expresses her belief that Zeus is indifferent, not the trusted god of the chorus, and that they must, as humans, take revenge and not leave such things to the gods.

Although the characters are not fully fleshed out as in the later, more mature plays of Euripides, they're not mere puppets or spokespersons for a position. Even the various messengers are distinguished: Hyllus' henchman (Alessandro Ciari, very good) is bluff to the point of ridiculing the decrepit Iolaus' determination to join the battle while the one bringing news of the triumphant battle (Michael Thayer) is flamboyant in his descriptions and seems to take pleasure in Eurystheus' desperation.

All in all, this Children of Hercules is a fast-moving, intelligently conceived production of a neglected play that has perhaps been unfairly disparaged by critics over the centuries. The mission of American Thymele Theatre, to promote and disseminate Hellenic culture in America, by producing plays with Greek themes -- we first encountered them in an excellent production of Euripides' Alcestis in Central Park two years ago -- is a worthy one, and they've done a great service with this year's NYC Euripides Summer Festival.

A special word about the kids playing Hercules' little children: silent, they are remarkable in their dignity, trepidation, and discipline, a constant reminder that this is ultimately a play about the plight of refugees. We have more refugees today than in the entire history of our planet, and nearly all the victims of abuse, like Hercules' children, are present among us everywhere but rarely heard in contemporary debates about refugees and immigration. Hercules' children and their elderly protectors are thrown out of everywhere on the Greek peninsula as ancient illegal aliens until Athens takes them in, an action Euripides and his Attic audience celebrated in this patriotic political drama.

This wonderful production will be back at the East River Park amphitheater on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., and at the same time on Thursday at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park. The final free performance of Children of Hercules will be on Saturday, August 11, at 5 p.m. at Theatre 500 at Times Square. If you like Greek drama, you owe it to yourself to see a performance if you can; although the audience at East River Park was enthusiastic, we're sure more people would enjoy seeing this play. We're grateful we got to see Children of Hercules. Δείτε Ἡρακλεῖδαι από Εὐριπίδης!

Friday Night on the Lower East Side: SummerStage and the Faux-Real Theatre Company present Aeschylus' "Seven Against Thebes" at East River Park

Tonight we were at the East River Park Amphitheater for the last SummerStage show of the 2011 season, and what a show it was: an utterly breathtaking presentation of Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes with a brilliant, feisty and fearless all-female cast of twelve reveling in song, dance and combat.

This hypnotic performance by the Faux-Real Theatre Company kept us transfixed and left us astonished at how they could breathe life into this rarely performed Greek drama. Directed deftly by Mark Greenfield, assisted by Alessandra DeMeo, with terrific costumes by Loren Bevans, astonishing masks by Lynda White, and set pieces by Michael Casselli, Seven Against Thebes provided us with a muscular, thrilling evening of theater.

There was a kind of end-of-summer sadness as we walked over the Delancey Street overpass over the FDR Drive after being deposited by the M14D bus. This was the first summer production where it seemed too cool for us to wear shorts, and it was already pretty dark well before the 8 p.m. start of the show. (We could have used a hoodie over our T-shirt, too.) But we got a seat on the first three benches below the amphtitheater's main audience walkway and were soon caught up in the Dionysian pre-play of revels of the cast, which included lusty shouting and dancing, wine guzzling, and devouring barbecued meat, which the only male, dressed as an ancient Greek man with wild white hair and beard, offered some of us.

He turned out to be the playwright Aeschylus, and he introduced the drama by explaining that of course all of the Greek audience knew the plot and how it ended, so he brought the audience up to date as some of the cast did a quick pantomime summary of the action. Aeschylus complained (rightly, we think) that the later popularity of Sophocles' Antigone led someone or other to interpose a new ending featuring Antigone and Ismene, as if to make the less-revered Seven Against Thebes a mere prequel.

When we read this play on our own as a teenager in a mass-market paperback of all of Aeschylus' extant works, it seemed distinctly inferior to the Orestia trilogy and to a play like Antigone, which we've happily taught for the past five years, which has half a dozen complex, well-delineated characters. In contrast, Seven Against Thebes has (if you eliminate the ending with Antigone and Ismene) only one named character, their brother, Eteocles, king of Thebes, who's reneged on his power-sharing arrangement (one year off, one year on) with his brother Polynices (or Polynieces), who's now joined the Argive forces invading Thebes, domain of the doomed house of Laius and Oedipus, at the city-state's seven gates.

On the page, the play is filled with some interesting stuff, but a lot of is cataloging: recitals of the Greek gods the chorus calls on to protect the city and of the seven Argive warriors leading the charge at each gate and the seven Theban defenders chosen to meet them in battle. To be a successful production -- we could find no record of this play being produced in New York (at least according to the Times) before the 1990s -- Seven Against Thebes must be transformed, as the Faux-Real Theatre Company does in spades here, into an imaginative spectacle,

with a frenzy of colorful warriors in combat, sizzling dances, impassioned choral readings, and the grandeur and terror that can convey the life-and-death struggle of a city besieged by terrorists (not long after the Greeks have repelled the Persian invaders) and of an accursed royal family that the drama was in ancient Athens.

We didn't have a program, so we've gotten the cast list from the Faux-Real website: Layna Fisher, Robin Fusco, Jenni Graham, Ebony Hatchett, Laura E. Johnston, Joy Kelly, Colleen McGloin, Erica Lauren McLaughlin, Alexandra Milne, Chrysten Peddie, Evgeniya Radilova, Dominique Salerno, Adriana Spizuoco, Rooki Tiwari, and Josephine Wheelwright. The actress playing Eteocles, the king who meets his rebel brother in mutually assured destruction at the seventh gate, was especially forceful and magnetic.

The play's greatest elements are mythopoetic, as in the cataloging of the weirdly characterized fearsome seven Argive invaders and their equally brave and idiosyncratic defending Theban counterparts. The curse of Oedipus (the two earlier plays of this trilogy, which won first prize at the City Dionysia in 467 B.C.E., Laius and Oedipus, are lost) that his sons will divide their inheritance by the sword must be fulfilled.

The action here never stopped, but the kinetic and verbal pyrotechnics never overwhelm the surprisingly thoughtful text, which contains still-relevant discussions of the role of individual dignity and inner strength when confronting what seems an endless cycle of poverty, war, injustice and oppression.

Having an all-female cast puts a different, and radical, spin on Seven Against Thebes, at least if you consider radical getting to the root of things. When Eteocles upbraids the chorus of women for being afraid (huh, they're afraid that in the event of a successful invasion, they'll be raped and ruined), his misogyny is highlighted.

The king says he doesn't like to live with women, since they're bossy when things are good and hysterical when things go bad. Yet these "women" here are also the fierce warriors who fight without fear or favor. When the chorus argues they're rightfully afraid, Eteocles replies that it's the citizen's duty to shut up and not express their fears even in the face of outside terror. Interesting.

In his own repudiation of marriage to a woman (his rebel brother Polynices has married the daughter of the king of Argos, the city-state leading the attack), Eteocles makes us wonder about his own sexuality. There's also a fascinating line when he announces that stoning will be the punishment for disobedience to the state, whether the citizen is a woman, man or (we're paraphrasing here) "whatever is in between them." He seems to be saying that he recognizes that some people have indeterminate or fluid gender. Again, fascinating.

Anyway, this whole performance seemed to work perfectly in all its elements. You can catch the Faux Real Theatre Company's Seven Against Thebes and Oedipus Rex at various parks on coming weekends, and we think you'll be glad you did. At the end of the tremendous applause for the show, SummerStage's Freedome Bradley again came to the stage and thanked everyone for a great SummerStage season.

We reflected on all the SummerStage events we've attended this year, starting in early June -- from Betsy Head Park in Brownsville, Red Hook Park in Red Hook, Von King Park in Bed-Stuy, St. Mary's Park in the South Bronx, Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem and Highbridge Park in Washington Heights to their main stage at Rumsey Playfield in Central Park -- and we're extremely grateful to the City Parks Foundation and everyone, including the corporate sponsors and all the donors, for bringing New York City such wonderful free entertainment. Thanks so much!

Sunday Evening in Prospect Heights: Xoregos Performing Company presents "Antigone" at Mount Prospect Park

This evening we had the pleasure of seeing the excellent Xoregos Performing Company's production of our favorite Greek tragedy, Antigone, in a wonderful outdoor setting, the heights of Mount Prospect Park, nestled off Eastern Parkway between the Central Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza and the Botanic Gardens and Brooklyn Museum. It's the second highest point in Brooklyn.

Director and choreographer Sheila Xoregos and her talented cast, some of whom we'd seen last year in this company's wonderful version of Medea in Tompkins Square Park, presented the last play in Sophocles' Theban trilogy with sophistication, economy and grace.

This 65-minute production featured standout performances by the versatile Amanda Elizabeth Sawyer in the title role

(she was a very different eponymous heroine in last year's Medea and David Allen Green as Creon, the king she opposes who brings disaster upon himself and his family

(he was excellent in last year's Medea in dual roles, including a very different king named Creon), as well as seven other actors, five of whom, along with Sawyer and Green, doubled as members of the chorus.

Sheila Xoregos did an amazing job in whipping up this version of Antigone; it's both dignified and exciting; thoughtful and passionate; and austere while capacious in its scope. It was easy to tune out the occasionally noisy softball game in the field behind them (there were rhubarbs over various plays not of the Greek tragedy variety) or the few passing joggers or scooter kids.

We've taught Antigone for the past five years in a dozen of our Literature and Writing classes at the wonderful School of Visual Arts, so we adore the various translations and adaptations of the text. The choral odes here are especially fine, as Sophocles uses gorgeous language to explore real dilemmas of the role of the ruler, the duties of citizen, the loyalty of a family member, and of law and justice, as well as meditations on transience and love.

We also taught Antigone in our undergraduate legal studies classes when we were a visiting professor at Fort Lauderdale's Nova Southeastern University in 2000-01, and a few years later, when we were director of the academic resource program and associate director of student services at NSU's Shepard Broad Law Center, Antigone was the subject of our first law and humanities symposium to honor our dear late colleague, Professor and Associate Dean Paul R. Joseph.

Antigone raises issues that are out of our daily newsfeeds. We often teach Sophocles' play along with that seminal documentary in American history, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which the civil rights leader explains why, for the first time, he disobeyed the law and explores the distinction between just and unjust laws, natural and unnatural laws -- all themes of Antigone.

Usually when we teach Antigone, we show scenes from the two VHS tapes we've managed to find at the SVA media center and the Brooklyn Public Library, the subtitled epic 1961 Greek film with Irene Papas (which breaks the conventions of Greek staged drama and has action sequences, with the real Greek army playing soldiers) and the very British stylized TV version from 1984, with Juliet Stevenson, Sir John Gielgud as Tiresias, and John Shrapnel as a Nixonian Creon. The Xoregos Performaing Company version would be an even better adjunct to reading the play.

The costumes, designed by Regina Cate, were all subtle variations on the same theme, blending earth tones with the royal purple, as the seven cast members seamlessly, with appropriate facial gestures and subtle body language moved from the major characters to members of the choral group. Especially effective was the way the chorus spoke as individuals and pairs, with all joining at various important points. Some verses were sung or half-sung, and that worked, as did Sheila Xoregos' vibrant choreography in the ode on the hazards of love.

Both Amanda Elizabeth Sawyer's Antigone and David Allen Green's Creon are proud and loyal, but her frustrations with her role as a woman and her fierce devotion to her late brother, despite his treachery against the city-state, and to the gods inform her every decision. Antigone's fatalism, presented in Sawyer's sometimes unyielding line readings, makes her seem a little in love with death. Her sovereign and uncle/great-uncle/fiance's father Creon, on the other hand, seems equally more unyielding, and Green shows him sure in his knowledge that the law is on his side as a tyrant (not necessarily a bad connotation in ancient Greece) -- but this Creon is extraordinarily vulnerable, and he's less steadfast and stubborn than in some productions. His adamant behavior comes less out of arrogance than a desire not to appear weak to a people hungry for strong leadership.

As Ismene, Amy Bohaker is in some sense more aware of the sufferings of their family than her strong-headed sister; she sees they've already endured so much and wonders even if Antigone's burial of their brother against the king's decree is worth the tragedies she correctly predicts it will engender. It's not entirely fear and lack of courage that motivate her, although she too knows that the laws of the gods trump those of man.

Michael Lawrence Eisenstein did an excellent job as Haemon, Creon's son and Antigone's fiance, as he sensibly tries to sort out the conflicting values and passions with a fierce but underplayed urgency. His speech telling his father to be like the trees that bend with the wind rather than the rigid ones that break, was delivered beautifully. (We liked Eisenstein last year as a feckless Jason in Medea, too.)

To the role of Eurydice, the queen whose devotion to her husband Creon and son Haemon is unquestionable, Katherine Mylenki brings a steely regal demeanor with the look of a woman who's already seen too many horrible scenes and cannot endure the one last blow. She appears only near the end of the day, but her suicide -- like those of Antigone and Haemon, played offstage as the conventions of Greek drama demanded -- is made even sadder by the actor's creating a believable human character existing apart from her formal role in the state. Bong Dizon, perhaps the sparkplug of the chorus, meticulously narrates the details of the violent central scene of the tragedy as the Theban trilogy and the doomed house of Oedipus reaches its conclusion.

If there's any comic relief in this headlong, onrushing drama, it's Reagan Porter's quirky Sentry, whose digressions and hesitations in delivering bad news to the king are a product of the kindest person in the play, the one in the lowest position in society and aware not just of the tenuousness of his own life but of his own shortcomings and those even of a king. Like the others, he also blended in with the chorus for most of the play. The actors were never "offstage."

All that is, except one speaking role. Apart from the actors/characters who make up the chorus, the blind prophet Tiresias (and his boy guide, played with quiet dignity by a very young Brennan-Pierson Wang) comes on late in the action, but the stentorian and sonorous Andrew R. Cooksey absolutely dominates the action. His dynamic voice and physical presence were so ominous and magnetic that he seemed to hypnotize a couple of little boys in the audience, who in one of those moments that make street theater so magical, stood fixed close to Cooksey as Tiresias issued his prophecy and responded to the king's insults.

There were cries of "Bravo!" and "Brava!" as the cast members did their curtain call -- something we don't recall hearing in any other play we've seen in the parks. It was well-deserved. We're grateful to the Xoregos Performing Company for bringing Antigone to Brooklyn for one night. If you can catch it at one of the Manhattan or Queens libraries or parks in its remaining performances (until August 13), you'll be doing yourself a favor.