tower of circles
by Douglas Messerli
Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound (translated into
English by Joel Agee) / the production I saw was on the evening of September 3,
2013 at The Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater of the J. Paul Getty
Museum, Getty Villa, directed by Travis Preston and performed with the help of
the CalArts Center for New Performance.
Generally
attributed to Aeschylus, and the first of what was probably a trilogy (Promethus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and
Prometheus Firebearer) Prometheus Bound is one of the earliest
of Western works for theater, and has been highly influential in Western
thought since its creation. Yet, it is also a play filled with difficulties,
particularly for our own time. Like Wagner’s Norse and German-inspired
mythologies, Prometheus Bound is
filled with sometimes arcane information and the complexly interlinking
relationships between Greek gods and the humans the gods have encountered. For
the contemporary English-language playgoer, the play’s intensive reliance on a
Greek female chorus who chant our their condemnations, sympathies, and prayers
for the great Titan, can sound, at times, almost comical, their shrill, wailing
chants spinning out into almost meaningless orisons. And what can a
contemporary director do to stimulate an audience who for more than an hour are
bombarded by the voice of one being, telling his story, sharing his suffering,
and predicting his and other’s futures, while all the time chained at the edge
of a desolate cliff? How even to explain Prometheus’ brief encounters with
various messengers of Zeus—Hermes, Kratos, Okeanos, and Hephaistos—and the
almost inexplicable, stumbling in of Io, who Zeus’ wife Hera has turned into a
cow, tormenting her with a magic stinging insects—even though she may later father
Prometheus’ eventual savior Heracles? Just as in long stretches of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, in Aeschylus’
work there is often not much going on in terms of action.
And finally, the very fact that this work
is only the first of three parts, makes for a sense of this first being a
fragmentary episode. Although Prometheus foretells his and also our futures, we can never be certain
that he really does have the ability to see what he claims to, and others
throughout the work scold him for not simply suffering in quietude to
ameliorate the wrath of Zeus.
But it is just that Prometheus can and
does speak, that he refuses silence and denies Zeus’ unfair punishment for
helping mankind survive, in particular, stealing for them the power of fire, that we
do care for this Titan, that we comprehend him, as Ralph Waldo Emerson
described Prometheus, as “the Jesus of the old mythology”—again reminding us of
Wagner’s Brünnhilde, who also was punished for intruding herself upon mankind,
and, like Prometheus, was punished to remain in isolation, in her case
surrounded by a ring of fire, for a seeming eternity before she is freed. If, at
the center of this sometimes static work, lay radical ideas about the fight
against tyranny, positing in Prometheus a hero willing to help the human race
and ultimately end the reign of the gods, how can a director steer a course to
successfully get to that point?
Fortunately, seasoned director Travis
Preston has saved his hero from shouting out his lines from linear rock,
raising him to a vertical circularity that equates him more with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian
Man. Simultaneously speaking from his towering heights, the Prometheus of this
production remains a Titan, while also suggesting a Christ upon the cross. He
is, in short, one of us, and something beyond us, willing to suffer the eagles’
daily clawing and swallowing of his liver, in order to deny Zeus any pleasure
in his punishment. Within the very stage set (the construction by Efrem
Delgadillo, Jr.) we see both a continuity of time, a circle within the larger
circle, the smaller bringing our hero through his daily sufferings, and the
larger, a circle of community, a symbol of Prometheus’ embracement of the human
race.
The chorus, appropriately, not only speaks
to him, but crawls up to join him in their shared sufferings. If there is
sometimes something almost comical about their efforts, so too are any mortals’
efforts to communicate with the gods.
Of course, even this striking
visualization of Prometheus’ position would mean nothing if Preston had not
found an actor who might be able to live up to the position in which he has put
him. Ron Cephas Jones not only has the taut, skin-and-bones body that
encapsulates the Titan’s suffering, but his basso voice booms out his thespian
skills quite brilliantly—in near perfect opposition for what I previously
described as the chorus’ more soprano efforts. Bound for the entire play,
unable to move by himself, he nonetheless seems almost in control of the busy
choreography (by Mira Kingsley) of the chorus, sometimes wrestling with each,
and other times circling in a round dance that might almost remind one of
Stravinsky’s pagan ritual in Rite of
Spring.
And finally, the music (by Vinny Golia
and Ellen Reid), heavy on percussion, creates through its jazz intonations a
sense of tortured coolness that reiterates the extremes of Prometheus’
emotional outpourings.
If at moments all these
elements—direction, acting, choreography, and music—momentarily slide into a
kind of repetitiveness or even stasis that might make us fear that the
difficulties of this tragic work might have, after all, won out—overall there
is enough excitement in this production that the plays’ revelations brilliantly
dominate. And even though the work ends, predictably, in utter despair, we can
believe that one day the eagle will be shot, the Titan rescued, mankind freed
from the caprices of the gods: Prometheus not only unbound but redeemed.
Los Angeles,
September 4, 2013
