Ajax in Iraq

Reviewed by Paul Birchall

In the canon of Greek theater, Sophocles’s play Ajax is one of the weirdest.  Even Oedipus, in which the hero kills his dad and shtups his mom, is more easy to understand than the story of the great Greek war hero who commits acts of brazen slaughter and then kills himself out of shame.  

Prosecute Ajax in a contemporary court of law and he’d be found not guilty:  After all, it’s the goddess Athena who capriciously makes Ajax so nuts, he’s not really aware of what he’s doing.   If it were an episode of Law and Order, that ole shyster McCoy would prosecute Athena for doing whatever she did to make Ajax nuts, and Ajax himself would be off-the-hook entirely.  

Playwright Ellen McLaughlin is not the first author to reinvent Sophocles’s drama as a metaphor for the travails of modern warfare. (Timberlake Wertenbaker did the same thing just last year in London.) But McLaughlin’s melding of the story of Ajax, which is interwoven with the tale of a modern soldier in Iraq, is still a fascinatingly complex if uneven work.  The piece boasts compellingly dynamic elements that are challenging and evocative, though sometimes overly morose.

In director John Farmanesh-Bocca’s adroitly energetic staging, McLaughlin’s adaptation follows two time lines – first, there’s the story of Ajax himself (Aaron Hendry), who, thwarted in earning his rightful war prize of Achilles’s armor, plots to murder Odysseus and Agamemnon in a wrath-filled bloodbath. The goddess Athena (Emma Bell, deliciously sardonic) instead magically turns him insane so he slaughters animals, thinking they’re the Greek generals. Ajax’s becomes so ashamed by his loss-of-control, he offs himself in an act of what we nowadays could call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The undertreated traumas of PTSD are voiced more explicitly in McLaughlin’s parallel story, which involves a young female American soldier, A.J. (Courtney Munch), who wins a great victory in Iraq, but is then rewarded for her feat by being savagely raped by her Captain (Dash Pepin).This drives her to the same miserable self-obliterating end as Ajax’s, as A.J. finds herself entirely unable to juxtapose being a warrior with being submissively humiliated by her superior officer.  

In addition to this, though, McLaughlin’s piece also rather ambitiously strives to tell the Iraq War-is-Hell story, with scenes of soldiers grumbling in their barracks about the pointlessness of being asked to fight in a war on behalf of perfidious politicians who themselves lie about the justification for the conflict. There’s also an odd appearance by the British Victorian-era Middle East scholar Gertrude Bell (a nicely prissy Laura Covelli), who whisks about the stage like Mary Poppins on her umbrella, as she discusses the historical undercurrents that led to the contemporary Iraq state. 

These many elements combine into an evening that’s intermittently powerful, yet also bloated and self-indulgent. A bit of cutting and focusing of the material might have helped.

The show opens with a dazzling sequence, in which the cast, clad as modern warriors, dance and gyrate on the stage and roar like beasts – it’s a striking depiction of war-spirit from director-choreographer Farmanesh-Bocca. The dream-like way the two time periods flow into one another and sometimes exist simultaneously underscores the work’s message that the warriors of the present are not so distant from those of long ago. 

And, yet, with its desire to be all things military to all people, the production comes off as derivative and a little tired – as though the writer and director are desperate to create a tale of abuse on the level of John DiFusco’s Tracers but are hamstrung by the fact that the Iraq War has completely different causes and cultural foundations from the Peloponnesian Wars. No one would say that PTSD isn’t a terrible thing — and no one’s excusing the crime of soldiers raping other soldiers.  But, even with the cast’s most passionate renderings, the modern situations somehow lack urgency.

As Ajax, Hendry is ferocious and suitably enraged, while Munch’s hard-bitten, suffering A.J. is both brusque and vulnerable.  Bell’s cheerfully spiteful Athena is a pleasure.  Ultimately, though, the work seems like three different and only tangentially related shows – and it’s a bit of a slog to sit through them all at one time. 

Not Man Apart at Miles Memorial Playhouse, 1130 Lincoln Blvd, Santa Monica; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; through June 1. (818) 618-4472, https://notmanapart.com.