Stupid Fucking Critics

Playwright Kenneth Cavander breaks his own rule: never respond to a review
By Steven Leigh Morris
 

Before getting to the matter at hand, an update on last week’s article on Independent Shakespeare Company. I wrote that as of 2012, the company had reported a 50/50 ratio between its contributions/grants revenue and its earned income. Since then, that ratio has changed to about 75/25.

The following dialogue was instigated by a letter of complaint, to me, sent by press rep Lucy Pollak on behalf of Antaeus Company and its playwright Kenneth Cavander. I had reviewed his play The Curse of Oedipus for LA Weekly, praising the production and much of the play, which was extrapolated from various ancient Greek texts. The review also expressed the sentiment that Cavander’s new play felt like an amalgam of Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone that had been somehow pasted together in a production so brief (two and half hours for three stories) that the original sagas had little room to breathe.

Lucy’s letter included the following: “I’m passing along a few corrections to your review — not that critical to fix unless you are so inclined, but just to clarify a few points . . .”

And so I replied to some of the specifics. After a few days, Lucy wrote back: “Kenneth Cavander was impressed with your comments/queries — and I’m wondering if there might be something in taking the argument a step farther?”

Kenneth and I spoke by phone the next day. (He was in New York at the time.) He said his wife used to work as a press rep for the Royal Shakespeare Company and she had always advised him to write letters to critics that vexed him, and then tear them up/delete them before sending them. But in this instance, he had broken his own rule.

I’m glad he did.

What follows is an edited version of our email correspondence over about a week.
 

(Kenneth Cavander’s plays, adaptations and translations have been widely performed in both the U.K. and the U.S. In England, his work has been presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and London’s Mermaid Theatre. In the U.S., his television plays have been aired on PBS and network television and, in England, on BBC One. He was a founding director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Second Company, where he wrote and directed several productions, including the musical Boccaccio later produced on Broadway. His work in American regional theaters includes: Guthrie Theatre, Yale Rep, Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Alabama Shakespeare Festival.)  

STAGE RAW: My understanding as that The Curse of Oedipus is a new play that employs excerpts from ancient works — among them, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides’s Antigone and Women of Phoenicia. Wondering what was the initial impulse for The Curse of Oedipus, and why did you select these particular plays to tell your story, and is there other source material that I’m missing?

KENNETH CAVANDER: Close. I used bits of Sophocles’s Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, bits of Euripides’s Women of Phoenicia and Bacchae, plus the story that his Antigone (which is lost) let the heroine survive. Then in the ancient sources you get stories about [Oedipus’s predecessor/father] Laius having raped the young son of a king who had befriended him – and that’s about it. The rest is my invention – about 50% of the total work in page count.

The initial impulse was a feeling of unfinished business. I’d been commissioned by Nikos Psacharopoulos of the Williamstown Theatre Festival to put together a full-length Legend of Oedipus saga, which covered two evenings, and was pretty successful, but I was left with a work that I felt was full of potential but unlikely ever to be produced again. So I started playing with a one-evening version, and coincidentally, the Antaeus Company, whose then director Jeanie Hackett had played Ismene at Williamstown, did a reading of the Williamstown Part One, and [director] Casey Stangl had the same idea. She got in touch, we exchanged suggestions, and after several readings, including one at the Getty Villa, the result was the production you saw.

STAGE RAW: I can well understand how, at Williamstown, a two-evening pageant based on the Oedipus legend would have its appeal. That expansive, luxurious time frame must certainly have allowed the various stories to breathe while, as you suggest, paradoxically rendering the production too expensive to re-stage without a sizable infusion of grant money. Yet on viewing the production at Antaeus, I felt the consequences of compacting multiple sources were somewhat (though not entirely) at odds with the unity, and new story, you were seeking. This has nothing to do with your intellectual or dramaturgical prowess, but with the size of these very demanding stories. Even if you’d included mere snippets, they’d have still, somehow inflated themselves like weather balloons. That’s just who and what they are. These legends are cantankerous, noisy, bloody, and they carry themselves with the entitlement of having survived so many battles and so many millennia. They demand their space. Another title for The Curse of Oedipus might have been Kenneth and Goliath. You wrestled with skill and acumen, yet the giant kept shoving back, and probably always will.

KENNETH CAVANDER: Well, this touches a sensitive spot, as it’s something I worried about too. On the one hand, I persuaded myself that it’s possible to link the parts of the original plays that deal with the core of the story and somehow harness them, like unruly steeds, to transport the audience through to a satisfying end. And technically, I think that’s doable. But in practice, as you say, they refuse to be entirely tamed.

SR: But that’s not quite what you’re up to, having written, as you say, a new work, not an adaptation. I think that distinction isn’t as subtle as it might first appear. Furthermore, my colleague Terry Morgan wrote a rave review of your play for Stage Raw. For him, it all held together beautifully, and he’s nobody’s fool, having written about theater for decades. I’m confident he’s familiar with the stories you drew from. Which is a way of saying that the differences of opinion between Terry and me have more to do with what these ancient stories mean to us personally than to objective standards of dramaturgy — which get ever more slippery the tighter one tries to hold them.

KC: Absolutely the conclusion I’ve come to myself. . . That said, the part of me that just wants the audience to see how it all hangs together and to have a good time is happy to give them a chance to mess around in the guts of these stories.

 

 

 

As you developed the play, both with Antaeus and at the Getty Center, how did it evolve? Were there surprises and discoveries that came about in the development process of what I guess could be called “play surgery” — fusing remnants of old texts into a new one?

Well, certainly . . . Things like the love story between [Oedipus’s daughter] Antigone and [Creon’s son] Haimon, which there was no room for in terms of standard dramatic structure but which we shoe-horned in by means of little cinematic touches — their meeting during the Dionysus Festival, [Oedipus’s other daughter] Ismene taking a love-message from Thebes to Colonus for her sister, Antigone.

 

 

And then there’s the Manservant. If you do a careful search through Oedipus Tyrannus and track every mention of him, you get a close-up of Sophocles struggling with his story structure and finally fudging it, just a bit, with this character. It’s a fascinating close-up of a playwright wresting with the myth on the one hand and reality on the other.

Think about it. Who is the Manservant? He is not a fighter, he runs away when the attack on Laius comes, and he is a liar (or at least, an exaggerator), when he describes the attackers as “too many to resist.” Presumably he says this to cover himself for not standing by his master.

All the same, this is the guy who was sufficiently trusted to take the newborn Oedipus out of the palace, expose him on the mountainside and not spill the beans. He was also the same guy who was so close to King Laius that he accompanied him on the all important trip to Delphi to ask what to do about the plague.

Then, thanks to the fellow who shows up from Corinth [Oedipus’s adopted home from whence he fled to Thebes], we find out that [Oedipus’s wife/mother] Jocasta’s “household servant” had, after all, been in the hills outside Thebes before the arrival of Oedipus there. And this is where Sophocles’s dramaturgy shows its seams.

The Corinthian says he and Laius’s “shepherd” met for “two or three years” up in the hills with Laius’s shepherd going back home in the winter, presumably to resume his duties in the king’s household. Okay, so far so good. In that case, the Manservant had two sets of duties — being a trusted household servant part of the year and then, in summertime, being a shepherd in the hills.

But here’s the problem that must have flummoxed Sophocles. If the Manservant was in the hills, and it was summer, when the baby was born, he couldn’t have been in the palace to receive it from Jocasta. (Or she must have summoned him back from the hills to take the baby from her — pretty unlikely.) And if he was in the palace, and it was winter, then he couldn’t have met the Corinthian in the hills, because they parted company every year when winter came . . .

I got quite obsessed with this puzzle and finally decided that Sophocles was doing some fancy footwork here to cover his tracks, but could never figure out the logic of it all.
 

SR: In watching The Curse of Oedipus, I was struck by how Creon emerged as the pivotal character — perhaps because at play’s end, Creon was making a crucial decision (to punish his niece, Antigone) that seemed an echo of Oedipus’s stubborn rectitude at the start of the play. So this question concerns Creon:

In Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Creon arrives with the news from the Oracle that the killer of the former King Laius must be found and punished in order for the plague on Thebes to end. King Oedipus then calls on the blind prophet Tiresias, who tells him (reluctantly) that he, Oedipus, is the killer of the former king — and worse. After Tiresias leaves, the raging Oedipus accuses his brother-in-law Creon of treason — of conspiring with Tiresias in order that he, Creon, can have Oedipus’s crown. Creon has a lucid reply, which you left out of your play — strategically, I’m guessing.

The first part of Creon’s reply is the foundation of jurisprudence and responsible journalism as we know it — that a public accusation must be based on evidence, not just conspiracy theory. But the second part of Creon’s retort is what’s pivotal to The Curse of Oedipus: Why would I want to be king? he asks, saying that he already had that opportunity when the former king went missing, that by blood-lines, he was next in line for the throne, but he chose instead to give it to his sister, Jocasta. He goes on to make a compelling argument that it’s better not be king and have influence over matters of state than to be king and suffer the pressures, and the animosities of others, that come with that role. And yet, In the Curse of Oedipus, on being made king, Creon has the remarkable line, “Oh, it is so good, to feel I stand in the sunlight, and it warms me. Creon — master of Thebes, leader of the people, commander of the army . . . At last.”

So the question is, how deliberate was it to leave out Creon’s more sage aspects in Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King,” and to create a more Shakespearean Creon with long-frustrated ambitions?

KC: Really interesting and perceptive questions here. You’re right — Creon is in a way the central figure. And you’re right again that there is a similarity between him and Oedipus – especially when you look at the way Creon reacts in Sophocles’s Antigone, and the way Oedipus reacts to Tiresias –– the paranoia about plots and conspiracies, the insistence on always being right, on refusing to listen to reason.

You understood perfectly what I was after with him when you pointed out the lines , “Oh, it is so good, to feel I stand in the sunlight, and it warms me. Creon — master of Thebes, leader of the people, commander of the army . . . At last.”

Which brings up something that sometimes bugs me. We all talk about Oedipus the King. But the title in Greek is Oedipus Tyrannus. However, even the English word tyrant doesn’t really convey the meaning of the Greek Tyrannus.

The best equivalent would be the title given in some tribal African societies to their leaders, “The Big Man.” The Greeks were very sensitive to the idea that a powerful political leader could get hold of armed men and by various means — cash, charisma, rhetoric, force of personality — take over control of the state and become a dictator.

And this, in effect, is the fate that Creon suffers – until Dionysus saves the day!

In the play I used the word king (reluctantly) mainly for its emotive force these days. But Oedipus is not a king, nor is Creon. He’s more like Napoleon than he is like George III.

I’m stuck in a marsh looking up at the gods you included in your play. Can you help? Having Apollo and Dionysus, as characters, comment on the action is marvelous, being a bridge between ancient Greece and the modern world. Aside from the impulse to war — within families and between nations — that these old plays speak to, surely anybody who springs up on hearing the alarm clock go off too early for comfort, and needs wrestle with the choice of getting to work or sleeping in, any such person must feel Apollo on one shoulder and Dionysus on the other. But when it comes to larger issues of world-wide virulent and paralyzing divisiveness, Apollo’s cocky belief in “light” and “order” looks as threadbare as Dionysus’s call for diversion.

 

Meanwhile, as you show in The Curse, Dionysus’s leadership role in The Bacchae doesn’t exactly end well either. Both gods may argue over the respective virtues of order and primal debauchery, but all that’s left from their guidance is bodies ripped apart.

Okay, but if you’re talking about Bacchae the only body ripped apart (aside from a few prize steers) is that of Pentheus, the precursor of Oedipus and Creon — one more ruler who thought he could impose his will on the (to him) chaotic instinctual forces he identified as emanating from women and the mysterious Orient. He staked everything on his Apollonian side and see where he ended up – his head detached from his body. And when you call the works of Dionysus “primal debauchery” you’re being a little Pentheus-like yourself.

Hmmm. I mean to underscore the significance of the violence: a blood-bath stirred up by Dionysus. Pentheus was no angel. He was a prig, like Malvolio, but with a better station. He was also a spy and very possibly a voyeur. But I saw that scene some 20 years ago and it remains with me still. There was Dionysus surrounded by dozens of naked women, luring in Pentheus, ripping off his clothes and then tearing him limb from limb in orgiastic ecstasy. Not only was his head detached from his body, as you say, it was detached by his very own mother, Agave, who, when she came to her senses, couldn’t quite fathom what she had done. Such is the hypnotic, blinding power and influence of Dionysus (admittedly, when he’s annoyed). I mean, honestly, couldn’t have Pentheus just spent a couple of nights blindfolded in a dungeon, like Malvolio? Dionysus is not just some ancient Greek Hippie, as some have described him. Perhaps he’s more like a cross between a Hippie and Charles Manson.

 

Since we’ve stepped into this minefield, why not go a little further? What I find fascinating about Bacchae is the back-story. What happened before the play starts and the Women arrived? Remember, these women are not Thebans. They’re from the East — and what does the East represent to Pentheus, to the Greeks of Euripides’s day, for that matter? Luxury, effeminacy, enslavement to a dictator, exoticism, mystery, fanaticism. And then, think about this. Who founded Thebes? Kadmos. Where did Kadmos come from? Phoenicia. Where is Phoenicia? The East. So what have you got? A society — founded by a culture from a part of the world that is viewed with suspicion and envy by the Greeks — has rejected something that is actually native to it, but now sees this “something” as alien and threatening (a feminine force). Pentheus falls victim to this so-called alien force’s overwhelming allure — only to discover that by attempting to repress it, he has transformed it into something lethal and divisive (to use your word), with the principal division taking place on his own person.

Towards the end of your play, on watching the “curse” unfold with bemusement, both gods choose to descend from the heavens and share the mortality of humans.

What I was hoping to insert into the audience’s brains, as much by humor as by logical argument, was the notion that we are all at the mercy of our personal Apollo-s and Dionysus-es – and you sort of say that yourself earlier, but there you keep them on the outside, on our shoulders, whereas I think they’re securely domiciled in our souls, and co-existent with our basic selves.

Fair enough. But Apollo is still useless, as far as offering mortals tangible help. He can stand for whatever he wants. As you suggested yourself, when Greeks and Trojans are disemboweling each other, Apollo might as well be standing on his head. I believe you’re right. I think his symbolic importance and practical irrelevance can also be a factor in your play’s resolution.

But the reason for the gods’ descent to Earth, inferred from your text, is their desire for immortality. If Apollo, on High, allows the “curse of Oedipus” to continue (as Apollo briefly insists he will), mortals will stop praying to him, argues Dionysus. And so he will die of irrelevance. (“If Apollo cares so little for the curse’s evil power, then mortals, finding you deaf to their prayers, will cease to care for you. Next, they will cease to think about you, and . . . Well, what then?”)

By descending to Earth, Dionysus will intervene into the plight of, and save, Antigone (as Euripides’s version would have it), and the curse will end. But so will the gods’ immortality. Still, Dionysus, being a demi-God, isn’t concerned. Mortals live on by breeding, he argues, “And so can we . . . By dying, we live.”

Your play is far too fascinating and resonant to exist as an antique curiosity. I’m seeking the big picture here, and fear I’m missing it. By being too literal? I understand how the world’s lunacy might be explained by the capriciousness of gods, at odds, in another realm — in the firmament or in our subconscious. But if the curse of Oedipus is lifted, and the gods, now on Earth, become both mortal and immortal, I’m unclear how that changes anything. What actually happened or, more to the point, how does it give meaning to the violent conflicts that continue around the globe?

 

“Meaning” — that’s a loaded word. This last question of yours kept me awake at night! Originally, I thought it would be amusing, and give the audience a break from the intensity of what was going on in the main plot, to have two of the principal Greek deities who are named in the stories behaving like contemporary, somewhat detached but fairly sophisticated power-brokers and letting them say what we all, at some point, say to ourselves about the myths — that they’re contradictory, nonsensical, arbitrary and really just show Olympians behaving badly.

I started there, and justified it by reminding myself that this is pretty well how the Greek contemporaries of the playwrights of the day felt about the gods — think of Plato and his disapproval of the bad example the Olympians set for the youth of Athens. And even Homer, where the Olympians giggle among themselves over each others’ peccadilloes while the Greeks and the Trojans disembowel each other in ever more gruesome ways.

Excellent point. Which raises the question, what use are the gods?

Not much, so long as they are on Olympus. But acknowledged as part of us — then they can be dealt with — maybe.

Their distraction and disregard certainly help explain the state of the world.

Then I decided it would be interesting to see if the gods could have something at stake. That was hard, because, let’s face it, what do they care?

Bingo! Yet at some point, late in your play, Dionysus, at least, does start to care, which I think is key.

That was the genesis of the idea that if you don’t think about them, they die. And again, that seemed to fit with the zeitgeist of 5th Century BCE Athens, where people like Protagoras were saying openly that man is the measure of all things and the gods don’t exist.

I would argue that the best tribute one can pay to the power of these stories is to stress the paradoxes, the conundrums, and tease the audience a little with them — a dangerous game, I admit, because everyone likes a neat ending, but I don’t think they can ever give you one – certainly not Sophocles with his incredibly enigmatic ending for Oedipus at Colonus.

So the very last image of all of the play is — or should be, if the lighting works and the timing is right – the face of a young woman, looking up to the dawn, a new era, when the curse is lifted.

I remember the ending well. My intuition is that the ending you describe is more romantic than paradoxical. I heard ambition-crazed Creon rail against women in the play, so I think I get what you’re after: showing how a woman, with strength and nobility of character, represents a new dawn. Don’t see that as a conundrum. I see that more as a prayer.

What can I say? I couldn’t help myself. On the other hand, I would remind you that when we talk about these plays we’re talking about fragments of a whole. When you look at the only complete trilogy that survives (Oresteia) the ending is, I would say, the most romantic you could imagine — bringing the spirits of blood revenge (Eumenides) together with the youthful energy of a resurgent Athenian city state in the ultimate kumbaya. And who brings off this feat of reconciliation? . . . A woman, a goddess! In The Curse, the place where Oedipus goes to find his ultimate destiny is sacred to the Eumenides, ancient female goddesses. I was frustrated that we couldn’t explore that image and what it means. Time was not on our side in that respect. But something is lost, if the audience doesn’t understand the layers of meaning in that association.

 

If your model is ancient Greek — and yours is mostly that, with a Shakespearean Creon — there’s considerably less venality and treachery. People tend to speak what’s on their minds rather than duplicitously, as they do in Shakespeare. They seem to be motivated more by principle than venality. But nonetheless, new starts, when they come, arrive at a great cost, some kind of purifying blood sacrifice. I’m guessing Shakespeare borrowed all of this, and stirred in treachery.    

I’d never thought of it that way, but you’re right.

So here’s the thought I had a couple of hours ago. Near play’s end, you already have Oedipus drumming to summon Dionysus (to save Antigone). You have Dionysus hear/heed the call and descend to Earth. You have him free walled-up Antigone by creating an earthquake — great. In this same part of the play, you already have the townsfolk pleading with Creon not to be so stubborn, but he remains obsessed with his own authority — as we discussed earlier, like Oedipus of yore. Creon’s fate is somewhat vague, as is. I think the last we see of him is

What if Dionysus stirs the townsfolk — certainly the women, perhaps the men too? — into a kind of frenzy of retribution against Creon, replaying The Bacchae with Creon now as Pentheus — not because he’s a spy, but because Dionysus knows full-well that Creon will never yield his power and authority to Antigone. He’s actually answering Oedipus’s prayer.

The townsfolk tear Creon apart, limb from limb. Antigone is at the center of all this. I realize that devastates your closing image of her nobility and innocence. But, like Agave, when she awakens from her dream to understand what she has done, she’s shell-shocked. Then you have your same closing image, and your play closes with a true paradox — this new era has been built on a brutal sacrifice. Nothing romantic about it and yet, if done well, it could be very affecting, and true to ancient forms.

Anecdote: When the U.S. and U.K. chose to invade Iraq the second time, I was covering an anti-war protest as a journalist. One image remains fixed in my memory — a counter-protest of pro-war marchers. I remember a young woman in that group pointing to a photo of President Bush while scoffing at the anti-war protesters.

“Look at him,” she hissed. “He’s a real man!”

That, to me, was Dionysus at work. It was Dionysus who presided over that frenzied almost sexual invasion. Apollo was asking for evidence. Apollo was deceived and then ignored. Apollo usually is.

Which brings me to my final point — when Dionysus is summonsed by Oedipus, what if Apollo, being Apollo, remains behind on Olympus. Let him fade into irrelevance. When you look at our world, do you honestly see a balance between chaos and order? If so, ignore this paragraph. But I see Dionysus stirring up all kinds of lunacy. I see Apollo streaking across Before I get to that, one quibble. You mentioned earlier that the last we saw of Creon was of him looking for the bull that destroyed his palace.In The Curse, Creon meets Tiresias and asks for guidance. Tiresias says all he can do is teach Creon to be a man, and takes him away. Creon is not still looking for the bull, he’s being introduced to the possibility of uniting his own divided self with the help of a guru who is, as we know, her/himself androgynous.

But a different, Pentheus-like fate for Creon? Antigone/Agave? You’re going to have write that version yourself. Not that I think a chaotic ending for the Creon/Antigone part of the story is out of place. After all, Sophocles wrote the ultimate action/adventure sequence in his version, except that it’s all told by a Reporter, not by Michael Bay’s helicopter shots. Take a look at the mayhem in Sophocles’s original play, the last minute attempts at rescue, the suicides, the frantic chase. Amazing.

All the same, I can’t deny the attraction of your argument for a new beginning built on a brutal sacrifice. It’s actually a brilliant variation on the theme — Antigone pitted against a more Shakespearean Creon – and throw in some more active Occupy Thebes characters as the “Chorus” and then … oh hell, you take it from there!

The Curse of Oedipus continues at Antaeus Company through August 10.