Racine demon

Freud meets formalism in ART Phaedra

by Carolyn Clay

PHAEDRA, By Jean Racine. Translated and adapted by Paul Schmidt. Directed by Liz Diamond. Set design by Riccardo Hernandez. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by Michael Chybowski. Original music and sound design by Christopher Walker. With Jonathan Epstein, Randy Danson, Benjamin Evett, Caroline Hall, Karen MacDonald, Stephen Rowe, Kelly Mizell, and Emily Vail. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center, in repertory through January 14.

For a tragedy, Racine's Phèdre is as spare as a Japanese floral arrangement and as formal as a cotillion. As for degree of difficulty, it's a reverse two-and-a-half somersault, pike position.

Thought by some to be untranslatable and by others to be unperformable, the 17th-century French neo-classical masterpiece is nobody's idea of an easy slide into a birthday party. Yet the American Repertory Theatre has bravely chosen to launch its 20th season with Racine's rewrite of Euripides -- in the French dramatist's hands a struggle between revered reason and monstrous passion, wherein sexual feeling is a moral weakness and (in Roland Barthes's words, reproduced in the program) "to name Evil is to exhaust it entirely."

The result is a production in which there is much to admire, particularly in the marriage of Riccardo Hernandez's monumental setting, Christopher Walker's anxious music, and Yale Repertory Theatre resident director Liz Diamond's boldly choreographic staging. But as the ART's own Robert Brustein wrote of the play in another context, "The presentational style of Racine's Phèdre needs little more than a bare stage and some extraordinary actors." This production has one extraordinary actor, Jonathan Epstein as Theseus -- though he certainly has competent support. And Randy Danson, a spine-tingling Agave in last season's The Bacchae, is a Phaedra whose neurasthenia ambushes her passion. Sometimes she seems almost entranced -- a Frankensteinian sleepwalker manipulated by her confidante, Enone.

It is true that the title character, who has struggled for some time to master a mad yen for her stepson, is depressed. But this Phaedra seems in so deep that you'd expect her depression to sap her sexual desire and so render her dilemma moot. "You are your mother's daughter," says nurse Enone when Phaedra, after much coaxing, finally gives utterance to her "perverse passion." That mom would be the highly unseemly Pasiphaë, who was struck so randy by an avenging god that she had a cow construct fitted around her body so the bull she loved would get it on with her. (This resulted in the birth of that skeleton in the Minoan closet, the Minotaur.) Danson makes you feel Phaedra's debilitating shame but not her almost feral lust. Even when (in her best scene) she advances spiderwoman-like toward the object of her desire, she more swoons than burns.

Still, this is an arresting production, one that uses formal strictures and vivid imagery to create a world of clamplike repression and primitive opulence. The new translation/adaptation is by that jack of all conversions, Paul Schmidt, whose versions of The Bacchae and In the Jungle of Cities premiered at ART last season. Schmidt makes no attempt to ape the rigid Alexandrine couplets of Racine, translating the work into a very Americanized iambic pentameter that's sharp and to the point but can be jarringly ironic (lines like the aforementioned "You are your mother's daughter" draw laughs). The script's recurrent images of darkness and light (Phaedra is the granddaughter of the sun) are echoed in the production design, with harsh patches of light splotching the cold copper squares of Hernandez's set.

Based on Euripides's Hippolytus, Racine's play is set at the court of Troezen, over which Theseus, king of Athens, also holds sway. Theseus has been absent for some months and is rumored dead, which leads to a lot of fear and rumbling about succession. As Phaedra confides her horrible secret to Enone, the reputedly love-proof Hippolytus confides in tutor Theramenes that he loves the enslaved Athenian princess Aricia (a character inserted by Racine to provide Hippolytus with a moral struggle). When Theseus is reported dead, Phaedra, at Enone's urging, reveals her technically-no-longer-illicit love to Hippolytus, who is horrified. Almost immediately, Theseus shows up alive, whereupon Phaedra, to cover her tracks (and using Enone as front woman), accuses Hippolytus of rape. In the hot-headed tradition of Othello, Theseus believes the wrong team -- with tragic results.

At the ART, Troezen is a squarish cathedral of reflective surfaces whose denizens address each other across vertical and horizontal gulfs, advance on each other ritualistically, even deliver blows that are powerful but dancelike. It is perhaps the naturalism of Schmidt's translation that renders this oh-so-Racinian formalism other than pretentious. But it is in fact entrancing, as is the weird amalgam of antiquity, the Orient, and pec-hugging T-shirts in Catherine Zuber's costume designs. Under it all is Walker's brooding score, with its exhalations that suggest something between a conch shell and heavy breathing.

Among the performers, Epstein is riveting, his anger, apprehension, and anguish muted yet piercing. Benjamin Evett is a muscular yet boyish Hippolytus and Stephen Rowe a compelling Theramenes, his description of Hippolytus's horrific end understated yet pulsing with blame. At the center, though, is Danson's dejected queen. Early on, Phaedra murmurs that "these hateful clothes -- they cling." And as the performance goes on, she loosens and sheds her raiment, becoming, literally, more and more undone. By the end, she seems barely contained by a flimsy blood-red shift. Emotionally, though, this queen is too morose to let it all hang out.