The Getty tries to make a new 'classic'

Normally, a trip to the Getty Villa’s fall theater productions is an exercise in making the past present. The Getty’s goal, loosely stated, is to give a new life to Greek and Roman classic plays. Like any production of a classic text, the challenge is making the text speak to a modern audience. What is it about The Bacchae or Medea or Oedipus Rex that still has something to say? What still resonates with us? In some of the most striking examples (Luis Alfaro’s Chicano takes on Medea, Oedipus Rex, and Electra come to mind), the production finds a modern context for the central questions of these classic characters to come to life. The success or failure of prior productions has rested on how ‘present’ the question at the heart of these plays is for us.

This year at the Getty Villa is an entirely different project altogether. Instead of breathing new life into a classic text, playwright Will Power has tried to create a new play about a mythic hero, Memnon. This isn’t the dramaturgical work of adapting a classic text, as there is no surviving play about this Greek mythological hero, the king of Ethiopia. Taking what’s known about this classical figure in the non-dramatic writings of other classical Greek authors, Will Power and the Classical Theatre of Harlem crafted a new Greek play, as it were. Thought of differently, rather than making the past present, this is about carrying the present into the past — weaving the bits of historical plot into a new drama. It’s a bit like crafting a collage of existing "facts" into a new fictional whole. We know this happened during the siege of Troy. We know Memnon was the nephew of King Priam and the King of Ethiopia. We know Memnon fought Achilles. Now, make a play.

While this is a thrilling new gesture for the Getty Villa, I’m not sure they are entirely clear on how different a project it truly is.

It’s easy to see Memnon’s attraction. An Ethiopian warrior returns to Troy to defend it from abroad. Why?

It’s a powerful question.

At its best, Memnon finds inspiration in what it means for a Black man, who’s been othered in many ways by the society he was born into, to be asked to fight for it. Will Power’s play really begins to cook when Helen, another outsider to Troy, confronts Memnon. Revealed is a new facet of this woman who launched a thousand ships. The burden of being seen as an object, an idea more than a woman, at the heart of this great war leads to questions of duty as someone othered and the difference between being a symbol and being a human. When these two "others" start talking about what Troy means to them, the window to a fascinating play cracks open.

The play, though, is largely a study in form. Rather than writing a modern play about an ancient hero, Will Power has written a play in the rough form of a Greek tragedy. There is the messenger speech, the oration, a sort of odd attempt at a chorus. The text, for all of its poetic beauty, feels distant. If the goal is to make a new classic play, especially at an institution known for its Greek scholars adept at placing the classical into a historical context, that might not be a bad thing. But in a dramatic context, it runs against the greatest strengths of the Getty’s best productions — making them present now.

But it’s not the form as much as the soul of the play that stands in its way. At the heart of every great Greek tragedy is the tragic hero’s quest or question. Will Oedipus save the Thebes despite what it might cost him? Will Antigone honor her dead brother or the rules of Kreon’s state? These questions — and all the drama that ensues from them — make these plays great. It’s also what makes these characters so compelling. Their flaws and their humanity are revealed through how they confront what they must do.

Memnon has the beginnings of a great question but it doesn’t really chase after it. Why does this great warrior return to Greece? Why does the one who hasn’t been rewarded with the treasures of a society fight for its existence? In an American context, this question has profound resonance. The play toys with the question at moments but distracts itself with all those "historical" details that "must" be part of the story.

That’s a shame, especially given the bold character that actor Eric Berryman crafts of Memnon (Getty regulars will remember Mr. Berryman from The Persians and The Bacchae, and lucky Angeleno’s may have caught The B-Side at REDCAT). I want to know what makes Berryman’s Memnon tick, but the play doesn’t give him the room to reveal that. Instead, like the text, it feels as though there's a level of remove — it seems like the play about a tragic hero but it doesn’t feel like one.

What should we make of the Getty Villa’s first attempt at presenting a new play? As tough as a modern adaptation of Greek classic is, making a new play is even tougher. Trying to make a new play stand up to the literal classics? Maybe not a fair comparison. It’s exciting to see the Getty continue to evolve, but perhaps we need to let go of the history to find the soul of the past. For me, I’m less interested in Memnon’s battle with Achilles and more intrigued by why he returned in the first place.

Memnon plays at the Getty Villa through September 28th.

This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.

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A stunning new chapter at The Geffen

There are nights when you walk into a play and before the first line is spoken you know you’re in for a remarkable experience.

Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size at the Geffen Playhouse is one of those nights.

The irony, when you walk into the small theater at the Geffen, is there’s almost nothing there: an empty space. The stage is a bare black circle surrounded by two rows of audience seats. You notice the lights, simple white light. But if you look closer, you’ll notice a logic, an almost sculptural elegance. You’ll see the circular patterns echoing the stage: a sense that it’s not just the light that will help focus the space but the very materiality of the lights themselves. Your ears will draw you to a single musician, Stan Mathabane, nestled in amongst the audience chairs. There’s a djembe, a talking drum, a drone flute, even a saxophone. While the audience enters (and you should get there early for this), he’s beginning to layer individual instruments over a loop (another circle) slowly accumulating a culture of sound and an interplay of rhythms and cries.

Three black actors enter, not so much walking, but absorbing the space before them and transforming it. As the opening lines of the play’s poetry fill the space, one of the actors creates a white circle defining the playing space with a white powder. Magic: a whole world is essentially created out of nothing.

Tarrell Alvin McCraney is not only the playwright, he’s also the new artistic director of the Geffen. When, in his season announcement, it came out that the very first play of his new tenure would be his own, I wasn’t sure how to feel. It was a high-stakes gesture. Here was a play that had been produced before in LA at the Fountain Theatre. The rare playwright/artistic director running a significant American theater. Would this seem selfish? Arrogant? Had it gone poorly, it would have been more than just a bad first production. It could have thrown into question both his art and his leadership. If it worked out? Well, what a way to start –– proudly claiming both your art and your artistic vision.

Brothers Size is a play you have to see. It is one of those nights in the theater that will spin through your nights for years. Get tickets now, they are going to be hard to come by.

The story of the play, on the simplest level, is the story of two brothers, the Brothers Size –– Oshoosi and Ogun. Ogun is the stable one. The one who is up working every morning. Oshoosi is the mischievous one. The one with a big smile.

It’s also the story of Oshoosi and Elegba, who form a different brotherhood. Both are just out of prison where they formed a bond both loving and fated.

What will jump out at you about the text is its poetry and its theatricality. From the opening lines, characters will say their own stage directions –– both as emphasis and as aside –– reminding us that we are watching a play as they pull us deeper into it. The text requires of its actors a mercurial precision, shifting from one reality to another seamlessly and fluidly.

Physically the world is created through the actors' bodies and the precise direction of Bijan Sheibani. No formal set or props to speak of, but to say it’s a physical theater piece doesn’t do the play justice. That ethereal poetry and movement is juxtaposed by a painfully real, vulnerable questioning of what we’ll do for love.

The performances of all three actors (Alani iLongwe, Malcolm Mays, and Shaun McKinney) are stunning. They traverse the textual challenges and the exacting choreography and infuse it with vibrant life. We go from the abstraction of metaphoric movement to a step routine to lip-synching over Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” Somehow, it’s as joyous as it is tragic.

Don’t miss this one.

If this is the beginning of a new chapter at Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s Geffen Playhouse, I’m all in.

The Brothers Size plays at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood through September 8th.

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