It’s all Greek to Jeff Caldwell, but that’s a good thing
“I came in and pitched an idea to do a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus the King’ and they went for it,” says Jeff Caldwell. Now, some months later, the play opens tomorrow at the Manhattan Beach Community Church.
Although Sophocles lived a few hundred years before the birth of Christ, Caldwell feels that the work is relevant to our day and age. For that matter, Voltaire, Corneille, Dryden (John, not Carley), Gide, Cocteau, and of course Sigmund Freud also thought the play relevant to their times. Well, who wouldn’t be fascinated by the story of a man who barreled over some twelve of the Ten Commandments, which is maybe why we have the latter in the first place.
The play goes something like this: Laius and Jocasta, King and Queen of Thebes, are warned by an Oracle that if they let their newborn son survive there’s going to be a heap of trouble and hell to pay. So they entrust the infant to a shepherd with instructions to put the little guy out of his misery. The shepherd clambers up Mt. Cithaeron and leaves the child to die. He fabricates an account of the actual demise, replete with vultures and wolves. In the meantime, another shepherd comes along, this one beholden to King Polybus of Corinth, and rescues the lad, who is subsequently adopted by King number two and his wife. Oedipus, so-called because his tiny heels had been nailed together (Oedipus means “swell-foot” in Greek), grows up believing that Polybus and Merope are his true parents.
Now, that’s sort of like being left for dead on Mt. Baldy by the Clintons but ending up being raised by Laura and George W.
However, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. One evening Oedipus has a chat with the Oracle at Delphi and is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Holy Smoke! the young man thinks; that’s one b-a-a-a-d fortune cookie. So he flees to avoid the prophecy. Later, in a roadside quarrel, he kills an older man; and we know who that was, right? Then, after solving the riddle of the Sphinx at the very gates of Thebes, and thus divesting this hybrid creature of its cruel powers, Oedipus is hailed as the savior of Thebes and propelled into the vacant throne. He marries the widowed queen, Jocasta, they have four children, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Until, years later, Thebes is devastated by a terrible plague. Although he’s had no luck with oracles and soothsayers, Oedipus calls in blind Tiresias after the oracle has announced that the plague will cease only after the murderer of King Laius is found. Needless to say, everything comes out in the wash, Jocasta takes her own life, Oedipus puts out his eyes, ouch! – and four children find their halcyon days at a standstill.
For those who wish to know how it all unravels, Sophocles wrote a couple of sequels, “Oedipus at Colonus,” in which the disgraced king wanders aimlessly, attended only by his daughter Antigone, and “Antigone,” in which there’s a contest of wills between the title character and her uncle, Creon, over burial rights for Polyneices, brother and nephew, but a turncoat in battle.
This is the mythic world that Caldwell has stepped into.
At home in the footlights
James Jeffery Caldwell is no stranger to the stage where “Oedipus the King” takes place.
“I grew up performing at the Manhattan Beach Community Church Theater, [performed] in the children’s choir as well as the children productions there, and then whenever they needed children for adult productions I would always get into that as well. That started my interest in theater and storytelling.”
He continued to act while in high school, and in college participated in competitive intercollegiate forensics. On the academic front, Caldwell studied philosophy and the classics. For his Master’s degree, he says, he focused on comparative mythology. “I have a huge love of history and ancient history, and I got really excited over the literature of that time as well.” In a Joseph Campbell kind of way, as he puts it, Caldwell learned about the universal motifs that flood the old stories and how those have been applied ever since to all forms of art.
After college, Caldwell worked with the David Kelly Company at Raleigh Studios in Manhattan Beach, “and at the same time started studying at the Stella Adler Studio up in Hollywood. I started getting small roles in short films and feature films. I’ve had an opportunity to travel the world and to see myself on movie screens all over. I’m not a movie star or anything, but on a very small scale I’ve certainly been living my dream.” Concurrently, he’s participated in other productions staged by the MBCC, including last spring’s “Little Women,” in which he devised the multimedia set design.
Standing in their shoes
Those who have seen plays or musicals at the church know that the quality of the acting is often mixed, comprised of volunteers (church members sometimes, with limited training – but unlimited enthusiasm) and semi-professionals. For some, like Caldwell, it’s where they hone their chops.
This isn’t to suggest that anyone will be fumbling their lines or freezing in the spotlight.
“We auditioned for everybody,” Caldwell says. Apart from people associated with the church, he continues, “we knew actors from this area that perform in Torrance and up in Westchester.” And, as the old adage goes, there’s an actor on every street corner.
Chances are, my summary of “Oedipus the King” had you, the reader, picturing men and women in togas and rustic clothing. However, in order to show that the themes of the play are relevant to modern times, Caldwell has opted for a relatively contemporary setting. Speaking before his assembled cast, he used the example of Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung” to make his point: It’s the same story, same music, same libretto in every production you see, but some are set in this era, some in that era, and some in an era – like LA Opera’s recent endeavor – that is more reflective of the director’s imagination.
Instead of going surreal in that kind of Tim Burton way like Achim Freyer and his daughter Amanda when they presented their “Ring” for Los Angeles, Caldwell wanted his characters in modern attire, but also floating in time – as costume designer Tina Zarro puts it – and so while one character, Lois Bourgon as the Chorus, has a 1940s look to her, many of the others are garbed in fashions more specific to the ‘60s, ‘70s, and 1980s. The idea is that the audience will more readily accept the issues, and especially the dilemmas, that the characters are faced with.
Because Oedipus is a king who – albeit inadvertently – abuses his power, one may look for parallels with our own heads of state. But Caldwell says that he’s not making any political statements. Instead, “It’s the story of a man trying to get through a midlife crisis, in a literal sense dealing with the plague that’s come on his city and moving forward with the choices and decisions when you find out things about your past or your parents’ past that you’re not too terribly excited about, and how that affects your growth or stunts your growth… In this case, Oedipus has to physically remove his eyes in order to not see the same way as he saw before.”
Naturally, if this is a midlife crisis it’s one that we may not wish even on our worst enemies. “Oedipus the King” is not only about identity and soul searching, it wrestles with the really big questions of free will and predestination: Was there anything Oedipus could have done to fend off his horrible fate, or was it always in the cards, merely waiting for him?
While the plot points are almost as accessible to us as they were to the original audiences, Caldwell points out that the Athenians – the first performances took place in Athens – would easily have grasped matters of context that elude us today. They knew about the contentiousness between their city and Thebes, and they knew how lethal an unchecked plague could be. Caldwell acknowledges that one is unlikely to learn of the relevant background material in school, but having studied mythology he set it out before his cast in order for them to have some understanding of the setting, at least psychologically, that served as the backdrop to Sophocles’ play.
It’s how you say it
As one might expect, there are many English translations of “Oedipus the King.”
“We’re using a relatively modern translation,” Caldwell says, one from about five years ago that’s also “easy in terms of the vernacular to get through.” He points out that the translation has preserved the beautiful poetry of the original Greek, “but sometimes it takes away from the play or trying to understand it.” Clearly this has been a concern for other scholars as well: “When you read from the older ones from the earlier 20th century they sound like they’re trying to recreate Shakespeare through Sophocles, and that can get a bit tedious to try and read.”
Because Caldwell wanted clarity and simplicity, he chose a straightforward translation and snipped some of the flowery prose. He snipped a little more where the text lingered on the incestuous relationship at the core of the play. As Caldwell frames it, Oedipus “marries his mother and kills his father,” and he’d like to leave it at that, bypassing the prurient details. “It’s constantly brought up that he sired his own children from his mother,” he says, “but we avoided focusing on the points of incest. They (his church) didn’t put any censorship on me, but I felt that because of the community that we’re performing it in, and being a church… I didn’t want that (the incest) to be a theme that people walked away with, going ‘Oh, disgusting, disturbing,’ or going into it thinking that this is going to be a play about incest or patricide. It takes away from the core of the story, which is a man in this moment of crisis.”
On the other hand, we need to know that this moment of crisis was engendered by something more serious than a missed car payment.
When pressed further, Caldwell explains that essentially “Oedipus the King” is a production [with which] we’re trying to generate revenue and outreach to the community. The point of these plays is to be a fundraiser for future plays and future productions and future activities that the church does, as well as to bring in new members and share with them why we all enjoy attending this place of worship together. Not just for whatever our religious beliefs might be, but because there’s a grander sense of community that comes through these pieces of great art. To be able to use the stage, we can do something a little more interesting and artistic and heady and bring in people, instead of having to dumb down, or relying on the same old road plays that everybody’s seen.”
I confirm his opinion that the church stages some arresting works, which I attribute to Jack Messenger, Lois Bourgon, Nancy Starke, and others.
“I feel really blessed,” Caldwell says, “to have an opportunity to play something out that I feel I understand really well, and to incorporate my artistic vision.” Furthermore, he adds, “Incorporating some new ideas, the whole [multimedia] thing that they haven’t done in the past with the church, and trying to make it entertaining and exciting, helps to propel the story forward, making it that much more easy for the audience to understand what is going on.” He pauses. “We’re trying to be creative and, most of all, have fun. At first that’s what it’s all about.”
Caldwell’s cast includes Marco Anthony Garcia as Oedipus, Denise Steyney as Jocasta, Gary Kresca as Creon, Lois Bourgon as the Chorus, Bob King as Tiresias, Connor Raftery as Strophe and Jennifer DiBenedetto as Antistrophe, JC Edwards as the Priest, Vic Jetter as the Messenger, and Chuck Chastain as the Shepherd.
Oedipus the King opens tomorrow (Friday) at 8 p.m. in the Manhattan Beach Community church, 303 S. Peck Ave., Manhattan Beach. Additional performances on Saturday, as well as next Friday and Saturday (Oct. 21 and 22), also at 8 p.m. This Sunday there is a 2 p.m. matinee. Tickets, $15. Call Nancye Ellington at (310) 379-3139 or email n.ellington@yahoo.com. ER
