The Heal
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
The Getty Villa
Through September 28
RECOMMENDED:
Everyone is wounded — that’s the overarching theme of The Heal, writer/director Aaron Posner’s ironical, imaginative play about living with pain and choosing to do the right thing even if you’re unclear just what that thing might be. Those three words reprise over and over in composer/performer Cliff Eberhardt’s opening song, and they are repeated at the end, too, to make sure we get the idea: that everyone lives with their own grief, which is why we need to show compassion towards each other, always.
Co-produced by the Getty and Round House Theatre, The Heal is adapted from Philoctetes, Sophocles’s prize-winning tragedy first presented at an Athenian play festival in 409 B.C. The title character is an injured Greek warrior, abandoned by his colleagues on a desert island and subject to excruciating pain from a snake bite he sustained years earlier. At the time Philoctetes’s howls of pain were so ear-splitting and the smell from his injured foot so overpoweringly putrid that his commanding officer, Odysseus, ordered that he be left behind. Now, a decade later, Odysseus has learned from the gods that procuring a magic bow in Philoctetes’s exclusive possession is essential to Greek victory in the prolonged and seemingly unwinnable war against Troy.
For assistance in his duplicitous plan, the wily Odysseus (Lester Purry) drafts the services of an honorable young person, the progeny of his long-ago friend Achilles. In Sophocles’s original, this individual is a guy, Neoptolemus; in Posner’s contemporized feminist update, it’s a woman Niaptoloma (Kacie Rogers), a strong, forthright gal not afraid to challenge the domineering Odysseus, an unprincipled powerful man accustomed to having his own way.
Eventually Odysseus gets what he wants here as well, by convincing Niaptoloma that lying to Philoctetes (Eric Hissom) and tricking him out of his magic bow is justified if more lives will be saved by expediting the war’s end. Deciding that the end justifies the means, Niaptoloma reluctantly accedes, yet all the while she’s disturbed — observing, in one of the text’s most memorable passages, how easy it can be to lie once you get the hang of it, and how helpless is the trusting individual whom you’ve targeted with your falsehoods.
Such heavy-duty themes as the universality of pain and the ubiquity of betrayal come divertingly packaged here with music, dance and humor born of human fallibility. As Demodocus, Posner’s take on the mythological blind Greek poet, the guitar-strumming Eberhardt is on stage throughout, commenting on the action with speech and song. He’s accompanied by a chorus of three women (Eunice Bae, Emma Lou Hébert and Jaquita Ta’le) who flit and whirl around the proscenium and sometimes into the audience, providing background exposition as well as wry biting commentary on the contentious action before them.
Both Rogers and Purry are well-cast, she as the conflicted heroine and he as a smug authoritarian villain, without conscience. But the evening belongs to Hissom, in a consummate performance as a ragged (costumes by Erika Chong Shuch), down-on-his-luck loner, his existence circumscribed by his agonizing foot and his burning sense of having been unjustly targeted by fate. In appearance and demeanor, the character reminded me of one of the homeless guys on the streets of our city one mistakenly assumes to be simple; then he opens his mouth and begins speaking with the thoughtfulness of a sane, literate and understandably angry person, tragically mired in the cracks of a corrupt system.
The Getty Villa — The Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater, 17985 Pacific Coast Hwy., Pacific Palisades; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; through Sep. 28. (310) 440-7300 or getty.edu.
Running time: approximate one hour and 25 minutes with no intermission.
