ARTFORD, Jan 25 -- The packed dirt floor before a derelict stone archway, the dried reeds sprouting randomly as indications of privation and neglect: all suggest a bereft, suffering community. On the circumference of the set, the withered and lost-looking populace of, we are told, a community health clinic has gathered to witness, we are told, a performance of "Oedipus the King." They remain silent throughout, but in Jonathan Wilson's strikingly atmospheric production of Sophocles' tragedy at the Hartford Stage Company, set in contemporary Africa, they are an integral part of the show.
The patients become the playwright's plague-weary Thebans, the playwright's grim and fearful chorus. Like the cast, they are all black, and the resonant but never stated implication is that they have AIDS. Their presence onstage provides the undercurrent for Mr. Wilson's staging, which movingly melds the timelessness of Sophocles' portrayal of inevitable human grief not only to modern Africa and its own rampant plague, but to the African diaspora as well.
The production is purposefully race-based, yes, but it is not political. Even with casting and performances that reflect the variety of black experiences, and with costuming, a hauntingly percussive musical score and intervals of dance that are all redolent of African culture, the show feels cross-cultural in a modern vein.
The script, a brisk, straightforward treatment by the playwright Adrienne Kennedy of a translation by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, pushes the vernacular cadences of contemporary speech but maintains a classical formality of diction. Mr. Wilson's intent, I think, is not to distinguish the black experience but to affirm its inclusion within the corporal and spiritual plaintiveness of humankind — and within its literary tradition as well.
In this, his production is quite successful, tying the clinic patients to the active performers as brethren and creating a deep and vibrant stage world for them to share. It is less successful as pure drama, largely because of some miscalculated casting at its center. In the title role, Reg Flowers plays too young; his performance evokes a presumed rather than practiced sovereignty. The same is true of Stephanie Berry as Jocasta and Michael Early as Creon; the Theban royal family comes across as weak.
Oedipus, as the play begins, has already proved his mettle as a ruler and a husband. His vow to uncover the murderer of Laius, the previous king and, unbeknown to him, of course, his father — a prophecy has declared that Thebes will thus be freed of its afflicting plague — is the act of a benevolent, responsive and responsible leader. But Mr. Flowers, a physically imposing and handsome young actor, plays Oedipus as a man who has only recently, as a wanderer, solved the riddle of the Sphinx and, to his surprise and delight, been awarded the throne and the queen, Jocasta, as his wife.
His authority is that of good fortune, that of a privileged athlete or a dot-com millionaire; it's hard to imagine him as a revered leader. He's Oedipus the Prince, someone who suffers on his sleeve, who doesn't have layers of self-certainty to be peeled slowly and inevitably away as his heritage and his fate are revealed to him.
As a result, his fall has an element in it of just deserts, as though he were being punished for his hubris, and this robs from the mounting human tragedy that gives the play its brutal power. It is only after Oedipus, with the knowledge that he has lived under a terrible prophecy and that he has indeed murdered his father and married his mother, has blinded himself that the depths of his agony can be free of nuance, and Mr. Flowers's best scene is the play's finale.
