The Fall of the House of Usher, at The Hypocrites

I'm not an Edgar Allan Poe fan, so--although I am a fan of The Hypocrites--I was not expecting to be excited by this production. I quickly reread the source story before going to see the play: the narrator visits an old friend, Roderick Usher, the scion of a gloomy house (in both the literal and figurative sense); much the (physically and spiritually) worse since the narrator last saw him, and caring for a sister who is apparently dying. The narrator spends his time trying to cheer Roderick up, with poor results.  Gloom, gloom, gloom.  Roderick surprises the narrator with a request to help inter his sister, who has died.  Narrator notes that the sister's mysterious illness has left a bloom in her cheek.  Days pass, with the narrator continuing to try to cheer Roderick, now by reading Arthurian tales aloud. Strange sounds are heard. Terror.  The sister appears, escaped from her tomb (having been buried prematurely). She attacks Roderick, and somehow simultaneously kills Roderick, dies, and brings down the (literal) house of Usher, which crumbles. (The narrator, improbably, gets away unscathed.)

Sean Graney's adaptation entertainingly sends up this campy nonsense.  He takes Poe's overheated prose and puts it into the mouths of three major characters: the erstwhile narrator, here a formerly intimate female friend of Usher, Usher himself, and a maid, who serves as a narrative foil for the female friend when Usher is out of the room. Poe's prose as dialogue is typically ridiculous, and Graney amps up the absurdity by casting three female actors in the play's four roles (Usher's rarely seen sister is the fourth), and having the actors switch roles, sometimes at an astonishing rate.The "horror" atmosphere invoked by Poe's prose is continuously mocked--the word terror is winkingly repeated in stage-whispered asides. When a new character enters the set, everyone screams. And every time someone says the phrase "The House of Usher," howling is heard and the characters cower.  Toward the end of the play, the house starts to leak, another effect played for laughs.

There is plenty to make this show funny, and yet Graney's The Fall of the House of Usher is plenty creepy, too. The set is ingenious and gorgeous: an enclosed dark wood space with multiple doorways and scattered piles of old books that effectively conveys a decaying and deeply uncomfortable mansion.  There's something very creepy about the narrator's persistent attraction to Usher even after she sees his obviously pregnant sister float by (no question, really, about who the father is). There's also something creepy about her persistent cough, though its purported treatment, gin and lemons, is a source of repeated laughs. And everything about Usher is creepy, regardless of the actor who plays him.

Maybe all mysteries are creepy. By the end of the play, things we previously laughed at (the actors' quick changes, the dripping ceiling) are part and parcel of the horror Poe (and Graney) want us to feel--Madeline appears in a bloody nightgown (at this point all of the characters are wearing white nightgowns, and it's a credit to the production that you see nothing odd about Roderick Usher in a nightgown) and water is streaming down over the whole stage.

And nobody's laughing. Actors Tien Doman, Halena Kays, and Christine Stulik do a tremendous job bringing conviction to their multiple roles while balancing humor and horror to create astonished pleasure.

Idomeneus, by Sideshow Theatre

This world-premiere production of German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig's drama about what happened to the Cretan king who joined his forces with Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus in the Trojan War, is a surprisingly engaging meditation on what-might-have-been.

Homer has nothing too remarkable to say about Idomeneus. He was a doughty warrior, and even held his own against Hector, but the Iliad ends before he gets home. Later writers, including the fourth century Italian Maurus Servius Honoratus and the French 17th century writer François Fénelon took up the tale: Idomeneus, returning from Troy with 80 ships, is caught in a violent storm that destroys 79 of them, and threatens to destroy his own.  Desperate to save his life, he promises Poseidon, the sea god, to sacrifice the first creature he encounters when he reaches land.

Are warning bells going off?  A middling familiarity with mythology teaches us, Never make bargains with gods. Having never learned that lesson, Idomeneus arrives home, and the first creature he encounters is his own son, grown to manhood in his father's 10-year-absence.  Oath-bound to kill his son, he does so, avoiding the wrath of Poseidon, but incurring the wrath of the other gods. His country suffers from a mysterious plague, which the populace eventually connects with the king's return, and banishes him. 

Or he does not kill his son.  In another version of the story, Poseidon excuses him from this murder in exchange for abdication. A related story has Idomeneus' wife, Meda, seduced and murdered by Leucus, who takes the throne and chases Idomeneus away when he arrives. (In this story, Leucus seduced Meda on behalf of Nauplius, who bore a grudge against Idomeneus, Agamemnon, and Odysseus over the death of his son; Nauplius' revenge was to arrange for the three kings' wives to betray their husbands).

In any case, that something very, very bad happened to Idomeneus after he came home from the Trojan war feels very true and very Greek.

Why is that?  As my husband put it (and as Schimmelpfennig makes Idomeneus whine in his play), "It's not fair." The poor man spent 10 years at war, finally won (almost miraculously keeping his army and its followers intact), and--days from home or even nearer--is nearly overcome by a storm.  But since when are Greek gods fair?  Throughout the Trojan war, the gods also battled, under the banners of Aphrodite or Athena. We know, from Homer's Odyssey, how Odysseus suffered after the war. And we know, both from the Odyssey, and, vividly, from Aeschylus' Oresteia, how the gods on the Trojan side avenged themselves on Agamemnon. It would be surprising if Idomeneus came to a good end.

But the diversity of stories and sources, and their relative lack of authority (after all, Homer is silent on Idomeneus' return home) provide a terrific opportunity for Schimmelpfennig to offer his own vision. Rather than dramatize a single narrative, his Idomeneus uses the incantations of a Greek chorus to spin out multiple permutations of the Cretan king's story.  Individual and dual performers weave in and out of the chorus as they represent individual characters, who play, and replay, scenes from different perspectives. The production manages to strike a balance between emotional distance and commitment.  Contributing to distance are the refusal to stick with a particular version of the story, the mostly third-person storytelling, and occasional humor. Contributing to commitment are simple yet spectacular set (featuring a tidal wave made of wood that forms the backdrop of the production, and a sandbox in the foreground, representing the beach where Idomeneus lands), generally excellent acting, provocative and often moving gestures, and the emotional impact of the writing/translation itself.

The Sideshow Theatre has mounted an excellent production of an intriguing play.