Greek tragedy as performance art

Walking into Third Child: Orestes Revisited, which is playing as part of the Fringe Festival through August 20, you get the impression that the action is occurring regardless of your presence. A man lies center stage as four women sit encircling him. One by one, the women get up and, with slow, fluid movements, form a tableau around the collapsed figure. Each woman’s eyes stare out in an intense, fixed gaze at something only she can see. Thus begins the intriguing and a little unnerving Third Child, which was conceived and directed by Maria Porter. What follows is what one might expect from a piece labeled performance art and based upon ancient Greek mythology. The story of Orestes’ murder of his mother, aided by his sister Electra, and his subsequent mental deterioration is more suggested than told. In a series of often aesthetically pleasing tableaus, Orestes (Morgan Hooper) is repeatedly encircled by the four women who both plague and shape his life: Clytemnestra (Yesenia Tromp), Iphigenia (Maria Barcia), Electra (Athena Colón), and a fury (Lesley Scheiber).

The women, who are clad in overlapping fabrics in cool earth tones, are wrapped in various places in bits of netting to symbolize the prevalent theme of entrapment in the original mythology of Orestes. The four are all strong performers, delivering lines accompanied by a series of sometimes graceful, sometimes spasmodic gestures that seem part modern dance, part yoga, and part charades (it is performance art, after all). All also have lovely voices, opening and closing the piece in song, just as any ancient Greek chorus would in the days of the work’s original author, Euripides.

Orestes is often nothing more than a puppet for these four women to manipulate; at one point almost literally a puppet, as he mindlessly responds to the commands “jump!” and “fall!” on cue. Unfortunately, Hooper never fully embodies the rage, grief, and guilt that should wrack Orestes; towards the end of the show, he begins to tap into some of that extreme emotion, only to pull away.

The piece closes with the four women, with eyes both haunted and haunting, staring into the audience. They are bathed in a bloody light and sing the second of two intentionally anachronistic spirituals that touch upon the theme of water (the first is “Wade in the Water”). As they are unable to stop Orestes from exiting through the audience, they stand both powerful and powerless and sing both an invitation and a plea: “Oh sisters, let’s go down/Let’s go down to the river to pray.”

Though Third Child may not appeal to everyone, those to whom it appeals will find this work very appealing indeed.

Death and Dreams

“You can lose the biggest thing in your life and it doesn’t make a sound,” says James, a science teacher at a local Brooklyn school, in a voice strangled with awe as much as grief in Lucid, a new play by Jordan Smedberg that is being staged at the Cherry Lane Theater as part of the Fringe Festival. Relentlessly keeping the wheels of your mind turning, the play feels a bit like a dream as it strives to link the scientific and the supernatural through the loss of a loved one. James, played by the amiable Jeremy Goren, spends the bulk of the play grieving for his wife Natalie (Natalie Thomas), who died from a heart condition. He tries to impress upon his students, represented by Ronald Washington as Jerome and Harhi Harris as Gerald, the theory of “dark energy,” an unknown form of energy comprising 73 percent of the universe that in the play comes to represent consciousness and a possible link between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

James’ relationship with Natalie is told in a series of flashbacks. When his grief causes him to sleep much of the day, we truly meet Natalie, who manifests in James’ dreams. She walks the audience through the sleep cycles, linking the mind's existence in a sleep state to the possibility of existing in parallel worlds.

Goren, Washington and Harris all benefit from the playwright’s ability to create characters that seem very human and to capture the difference in dialogue and speech patterns from character to character, which makes line delivery flow naturally. In fact, the chemistry among the three actors, especially between Goren and Washington, is a particularly striking aspect of the play.

Goren adeptly embodies the amicable awkwardness and mild eccentricity of a science teacher and radiates the weight of extreme grief from the inside out. Thomas does triple duty as Natalie in the present, the memory or spirit of Natalie, and Natalie the narrator. Thomas seems comfortable playing Natalie in the present; it’s when she assumes the other facets of her character that her performance gets a bit muddled.

Mariel Goddu’s direction of the play’s surreal aspects at times is poignant and effective and at other times feels forced. The appearance of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in certain dream sequences seems superfluous, while it's quite compelling to see Thomas slither out of her shirt and disappear as her character passes out, leaving James at one moment holding her unconscious body and at the next holding an empty shirt to symbolize her death.

With a title that simultaneously means luminous, sane and intelligible, Lucid both fulfills and contradicts each definition of the word at any given moment and provides a thought-provoking, intense and intellectual evening. It is still a work in progress, but it is also a work of great profundity and promise.