Sunday Afternoon in Fort Greene: The Faux-Real Theatre Company's "Jason and the Argonauts" at Fort Greene Park

We almost never have gone back for a second time to see one of the outdoor play productions that we've been going to for years, but this afternoon we went over to Fort Greene Park to see the Faux-Real Theatre Company's Jason and the Argonauts, which we enjoyed seeing during its SummerStage premiere one night in late August in East River Park.

But we were unfamiliar with the classical source material, The Argonautica, not an example of Greek drama but an epic poem,

the only surviving one of the Hellenistic era, and were impressed enough by the Faux-Real company's rendering of the poem's narrative into a rollicking, fast-moving, inventive stage performance that we wanted to see it again, in daylight, in a different venue.

And we can only say that we were even more impressed with the vast ambition of this production, adapted and directed by Mark Greenfield from Aaron Poochigian's translation of Apollonius of Rhodes' epic poem and how well the production

achieves a transformation of what probably is a bit plodding narrative, interrupted by numerous side stories and digressions, into a coherent, postmodern, large-canvas story that is both postmodern and relevant without going into the adventure-mode action film we all remember from Jason and the Argonauts in the movies.

Jason is perhaps the best, if not the only example, of the classical antihero; even in the poem and in his historical/literary reputation, he's a bit of a jerk, scheming, often unheroic, moody, petulant, and egotistical.

Adam L. Ross, one of the only members of the cast not playing four or more roles, gets Jason just right, and makes him sympathetic without making him as noble as we'd expect.

Heracles, too, played (among other roles) by Ara Morton, seems unheroic, and the funny thing is, it's in the text: he's bedazzled by his bubble-headed boytoy Hylas (a very funny Gökçen Gökçebağ) and often seems overwhelmed by events. This befuddled Heracles blusters and blunders, and his kids'-toy giant plastic hammer pretty much encapsulates his character.

The tour de force of a performance features a large, multicultural, multigenerational cast with a troupe of excellent performers not afraid to take risks, whether that means walking into the audience

(here we sat on the steps, with most of the action taking place on a raised "stage" platform and in front of it,

sometimes close enough for those of us in the front row to touch some of the actors) and ad-libbing with people or making use of the kind of random events (a stray ball, someone wandering into the performing space) that can make outdoor theater so exciting.

Just as in last year's Seven Against Thebes, the Faux-Real performers liven the narrative by constantly handing off the text; sometimes they recite as a group or chorus; sometimes alone; sometimes in pairs.

As the highly stylized production - with amazing costumes and props - moves forward with increasing momentum as Jason and his Argonauts trek on their ultimately successful capture of the Golden Fleece, sometimes the characters will be reciting dialogue, sometimes narrating their own stories. 

And there's a real book - a hefty volume labeled The Argonautica that cast members sometimes directly "read" from.

The action, and the text, moves chock-a-block, nonstop, accompanied by imaginative choreography.

Particularly effective are the various masks and other devices, such as the thick red ribbons that keep coming out of the lambs and oxen that are sacrificed or killed .

The entire cast is incredibly effective, both in their myriad roles - for example, Mari Yamamoto plays Zetes, one of the sons of the North Wind; a Water Nymph; the goddess Aphrodite trying to coax her little son Eros (the adorable and sly Jack Alan Greenfield) into shooting an arrow to further the cataclysmic romance of Jason and Medea; and Polydeuces, the handlebar-mustached fighter whose fists fell a hostile man-mountain of a king in a lethal boxing match.

Similarly, one of the standouts in the cast, the wonderful Jenni Graham, does quadruple duty as the Moon (she holds a big yellow crescent), Iris, protectors of the scary Harpies; Polyxo, who advises the Lemnian women to have kids with the Argonauts; and most memorably as Argus, the builder of the sort-of-good ship Argo, with a pirate's eyepatch and a trilling R whenever he refers to himself by name as "Arrrgus" (not to be confused with the other Argus, who's rescued late in the play and joins the Argonauts). Like many in the cast, Jenni Graham is a ball of classic fire.

We feel funny singly out any cast members because they are all so wonderful and distinctive even as they perform as a seamless unit. The actors include Dylan Combs (especially good as Acetes, Medea's father); Josephine Wheelwright (in at least six roles); Alejandro Santoni, who plays a stolid Zeus and three other parts; Kathleen Fletcher (the argonaut Lyncesus and other roles); Dorian Shorts, a dragon and a harpy and two human characters;

Stephanie Regina, a vixenish but very conflicted Medea (she has five other roles); Harley Ware (Idas, Glaugus, Chorus Leader 5, Masks); Adriana Spizuoco, who plays Hipsipyle, a Lemnian woman Jason impregnates and then, characteristically, forgets about, and several others;

Alison Linker (Chorus Leader 4 [they take turns]/Calais/Nymph/Circe/Masks); Joy Kelly as Hera - all the major gods are masked - and Chorus Leader 3; Karun Deep Sagar, the other youngster in the play, who flies like a Dove and dies like a Colchian soldier; and director Mark Geenfield, who has a good singing voice as Orpheus.

The performance is very funny at times, with idiosyncratic characters who appear to have twentieth century neuroses (this actually seems to come from Apollonius Rhodius' original text, in the lively, fluid translation by Poochigian).

With terrific masks, several wonderful musicians (including Sean Mullins, Jeff Wood and Michael Mitchell) playing a variety of instruments and sound-effect devices; amazingly vivid costumes by Irina Gets; clever props (John Milano); and obviously a lot of hard work as the company changes the action for each park - today's Fort Greene Park version worked differently, but no less effectively than the one at the East River Park Amphitheater at night, The Faux-Real Theatre Company's Jason and the Argonauts succeeds not only as spectacle but by bringing an overarching unity and coherence to an episodic and idiosyncratic narrative.

We're grateful we got to see them a second time. Next weekend at 3 p.m. they'll be at the Morris-Jumel Mansion for the final two Saturday and Sunday performances. This company does excellent, innovative work in radically and holistically bringing classical performances alive.

Monday Night on the Lower East Side: SummerStage presents The Faux-Real Theatre Company's "Jason and the Argonauts" at East River Park

Tonight at East River Park we saw another great SummerStage presentation by the Faux-Real Theatre Company, Jason and the Argonauts, a wildly innovative and dramatically compelling adaptation of Apollonius Rhodius's epic The Argonautica as translated by Aaron Poochigian.

Directed by Mark Greenfield, the narrative of the digressive and oddly postmodern poem, with a seemingly endless number of characters and adventures, works spectacularly well in making this semi-obscure work of the third century B.C.E. comprehensible and truly exciting for a contemporary audience.

As the retelling of the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece, a kid's story it's not. (But it also is.)

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.

Thursday Evening in the East Village: Xoregos Performing Company's "Medea" by Euripides at Tompkins Square Park

This evening we saw a compelling 70-minute production of Euripides's Medea by Xoregos Performing Company in Tompkins Square Park.

We arrived early and found a seat on a bench where we saw others sitting and people in stylized Greek costumes in front, so we figured we were in the right place.

The play was directed and choreographed by Shela Xoregos, a veteran of numerous classical productions, who apparently views Medea as the first extant feminist play and makes an excellent case for it by the way she sets up the portrayal of the rage of the wronged wife Medea, left by her husband for a second (trophy) wife in the form of a princess, and how this rage - and terror - lead her to icily controlled madness, infanticide, and ruin for all.

At top, the entire cast is reciting the prologue by Kimberly Shelby-Skyszo, which economically described the background of Medea and Jason and set the stage, literally, for the inexorable tragedy to come.

The cast featured Amanda Elizabeth Sawyer giving a subtle, chilling and very postmodern performance in the title role as the wronged and ultimately monstrous Medea, who moves from abandoned depressive to efficient killer, and Michael Lawrence Eisenstein as a feckless, dynamic Jason; you honestly believe he is a former hero grown cocky, but when he loses all he has tried to grasp for at the tragedy's end, he realizes his own moral cowardice).

In the sympathetic roles of Medea's servants, Sydney Allyson Francis as the Nurse, Andrew R. Cooksey as the Tutor of the two sons (played by somehow even more pathetic dolls with bright red and blond hair) are moving in their concern.

David Allen Green played both Creon, the King of Corinth, whose daughter has stolen Jason from Medea, and very effectively later, the Messenger who chillingly relates the doom unleashed by Medea in Creon's household. (His horror-filled narrative is made even more so by his lack of awareness of Medea's icy, delighted reaction upon hearing it.)

Philip Burke is AEgeus, the noble, generous but a little too politic King of Athens,

and much of the play's mood was conveyed in movement as well as words by a trio of Emilys as the Chorus of Corinthian Women: Emily Beuchat, Emily Philio and Emily Tuckman.

The cast had to put up with a lot of park distractions to concentrate, as did the audience. Elderly people and children seemed to walk right in front of the actors with total obliviousness, briefly there was one ranting psychotic in the background and one elderly drunk who got in between Medea and Jason (we persuaded him to sit down next to us; "You'll be sorry," he said, and we were); a large group of bicyclists in three-cornered colonial hats with cardboard horse's heads mounted on the their bikes (they were loud and protesting something or other); and basically the usual East Village freak show. But we all persevered, cast and audience alike, and it was worth it.

The costumes by designer Dorthée Sénéchal and associate designer Jara Belmonte were quite ingenious, with the capes a wonderful touch. Also clever was the stylized final escape by Medea in a barely-suggested but clear interpretation of the dragon-pulled chariot that provides her getaway. Composer Nick Revel set selected choral odes to be sung á capella.

The production was commissioned by the Queens Public Library, and we're sure that earlier performances at the Forest Hills, Flushing, and Jackson Heights branches, as well as ones at Bronx and Manhattan libraries, had fewer distractions. There's one last performance at the Broadway (at 41st Street) branch of the Queens Library on Saturday at 2 p.m.

We're glad we got to see this Medea tonight, exactly three weeks after we saw another Euripides play in a Manhattan park.