With Homer’s 12,000-line epic poem recently inscribed onto the big (really big, IMAX big) screen, it’s fair to say that our ancient stories are having a moment. Or maybe it’s a moment that has always held steady—as playwright and director Carey Perloff tells it, the Greeks were contending with the very same questions that plague contemporary life.
Last night, Oedipus: King/Colonus, Perloff’s take on Sophocles’ Oedipus story, saw its world premiere. The PlayMakers Repertory Company production will run in Chapel Hill through September 27. Perloff, who served as artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco for twenty-five years, both adapted the material and directed the play.
“It was thrilling to look at these very ancient plays written 2,500 years ago,” Perloff, who began working on the play during the pandemic, told the INDY, “that were wrestling with the same anxieties and questions that we were wrestling with.”
Sophocles wrote the Oedipus trilogy in the 5th century, circling the tragic story of King Oedipus from different angles. His trilogy—Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone—follow the king from birth, when he was abandoned by his royal parents, following a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, only to grow up and, while striving to save his city from a plague, unwittingly fulfills the prophecy. Perloff takes two of those plays, Rex and Colonus, and inverts them, with a production that begins at the end of Oedipus’ life.
Free will and fate, generational trauma, what it means to look back on your life and change your mind about it—all this and more comes up with Perloff, an educator and effortless extemporaneous speaker, in a conversation with the INDY about the production. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
INDY: The story of Oedipus is revisited by Sophocles three times, and I know you’ve also revisited it several times. Can you fill readers in, as you can, to what interested Sophocles so much about this one story?
PERLOFF: What’s so amazing, when you go back to the Greeks, is how familiar the material feels to us where we sit right now. It’s a drama that evolved with the evolution of democracy—and democracy was never a settled thing in Athens, it was very short-lived, alas.
That experiment in how leadership and the public related to each other—how people governed themselves, what government by the people might look like, who belonged, who got to be a citizen, what justice was—these are all things we’re still reckoning with right now. All our questions about birthright citizenship, immigration, who has rights, what the statute of limitations is on crime, what the public voice is, how we let our voices be heard—all those things are essential to Greek tragedy.
I went back to the Oedipus story right during COVID, which of course made sense because Sophocles wrote about a leader in the middle of a time of plague—which Athens was, when he wrote Oedipus Tyrannus. It was very like the situation we found ourselves in, in COVID, where we were wondering what it meant—how it happened, who we should listen to, what our leadership was telling us, all of those things.
The Greeks wrestled with these questions of fate and free will. I think we also wrestle with those, but don’t necessarily use that language anymore. In contemporary culture, where do you see those questions being contended with?
I mean, it’s really interesting. For example—in the racial reckoning that we went through, after George Floyd, there were sort of two strains of thought. There was a strain that said that racism in America is so systemic that no matter what people do, the obstacles will always be enormous because it’s built into the system. And there are other people who felt human agency, individual human agency, is more important than the system itself, and that people can make the choice to make their own lives different.
We toggle back and forth between those two schools of thought, and that’s exactly what the Greeks reckoned with. Does Oedipus have agency, or is fate going to bite him no matter what? And of course, the irony is, he’s full of will. He’s so determined to find out who he is. In part because, in my reading of the play, it’s really salient that he is an adopted child.
And so on the one hand, Oedipus’s action throughout the play is to pursue self-knowledge. He is determined to find out who he is, which is really admirable, and he won’t let anybody get in his way, even his wife Jocasta—who’s his mother, as it turns out, and whom he adores. He blasts through all of that, and then, of course, fate catches up to him anyway. In Oedipus Tyrannus, he takes responsibility for that and says, “I’m the one who did it, and I blind myself, and I want to be exiled because I’m so guilty.”
But by the time he’s old, he changes his tune completely and says, “Actually, it was fate. I didn’t know it. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t know she was my mother. I didn’t know Laius was my father, so how can I be blamed for sleeping with her and killing him?” And that’s a really interesting question. That’s not really resolvable, you know, about fate versus free will.
What do you feel like you learned about Oedipus from reversing the chronology?
I always like to work on something that I don’t really understand because you figure as you work on it, you will get insights into it. And I didn’t understand Oedipus at Colonus. I didn’t understand how this brilliant man who had taken agency for himself suddenly walks on stage and says, “I’m not guilty,” and then at the end of the play has this completely supernatural death with no tomb.
He kind of vaporizes, which I also didn’t really understand. And then I came to see that, you know, it’s all tied to the same thing about his origin story and his adoption. If you have no past or no narrative about your own past, you also, sort of, have no future. He can’t make a future for himself because he doesn’t really know who he is to begin with, and by the time he’s learned it, he’s too old to integrate that into his life.
So he can’t die a regular death and be mourned by his children, who are also his siblings, and have a family tomb because the whole family history has been so upended. And so he has this supernatural death—it’s kind of magical and surreal, and none of them really understand it. There’s an amazing speech at the end of [Oedipus: King/Colonus] given by Sam Gates, where he comes and describes that Oedipus just disappeared and the earth cracked open. The messenger says, maybe the earth cracked open in love to take him in.
He’s had to rewrite his own destiny, and I think one of the things that I learned is how trauma is inherited. We’re studying this a lot now in contemporary culture—you know, The Body Holds the Score, all those books that have taught us to really try to understand how childhood trauma is carried into adulthood and then into the next generation. The Greeks really investigated that, and the reason I put a little tiny clip of Antigone at the very end of the play is that the girls inherit the trauma of their father, even though they adore him, and they’re going to carry it out. They’re incapable of leaving that behind.
A friend who is adopted just had a baby and has talked about the experience of not knowing what her parents look like, and then looking at her baby and seeing her face in another’s for the first time.
I think it’s really the central thing about the Oedipus story. I read an incredible book called Journey of the Adopted Soul by Betty Jean Lifton, and it starts with talking about Oedipus, which interested me so much because we always think about Freud, and I think Freud is completely wrong. I don’t think the message of the play is that all men want to fuck their mothers and kill their fathers. I think the salient thing is not knowing who his parents were, and that really colors his behavior in every way.
In your adaptation, the choruses are sung rather than spoken. What made you decide to do that, and how has that shaped the production?
Originally a Greek chorus would have been up to about 20 people singing everything and dancing. In contemporary productions of the Greeks, we usually get rid of the chorus because we don’t know what to do with it, right? We don’t understand how to represent a public voice and find it peculiar, so we just cut it out. [But] then I think you cut out the heart of Greek tragedy because we are the chorus, and the chorus is us.
The chorus is bewildered and interested and excited and terrified and all the things we are, and the protagonists behave in certain ways, and then they leave the stage and the chorus says, “What just happened? How could Oedipus, whom we love and admire, turn out to be a killer? Why didn’t we see it coming? What happens if …there’s no belief in the gods?”
Everything was conducted in the public square in Athens, in the agora, in the marketplace, and the most private things are put in front of the chorus so that the chorus can kind of help litigate or adjudicate who’s right and wrong. When Creon and Oedipus fight, it is for the approval of the chorus. They are trying to get the chorus on their side, like a jury. Very sadly, we were thinking about that Lindsey Clancy trial while we were working on this—the most hideous, awful thing to adjudicate. Imagine being a jury that has to decide who’s guilty for a mother’s murder of her children. There’s no good outcome in that circumstance.
You recently wrote a tribute to Tom Stoppard, who I know is very interested in experimenting with time in his plays. I’m curious if Stoppard, or that interest in time being malleable, shaped the direction of the play.
Oh, that’s so interesting! I never really thought about that. I mean, yes, he was the playwright I worked with most in my career, and I miss him every day. Just a gift of my life to work with him.
So, you know, maybe I did have that in the back of my mind. I also was working with an actor at the time when I started this collaboration, who said to me that when he approaches a play or a novel, he always starts at the end to ask, “How did this person get to this place?” And that’s why I started with Oedipus at Colonus because I thought, “Well, that’s the end of the story.” We look at this old, vagrant, homeless man walking onto the stage with his daughter, and we ask, “How did this man, this brilliant man, get to this point?” And then we go backward. So I do love time travel.
Last question: It’s the week of the premiere. Are there any moments from the rehearsals that stick out to you?
Colonus is the strangest play ever. You know, Tyrannus is a thriller, and we all got so excited, and it goes and goes and goes. And then Colonus is quite a different play, but there is this incredible scene between Oedipus and his son, Polyneices, who is played by a fantastic MFA student called Dawson. It’s just the most unbelievable scene because you think it’s going to be like King Lear, and in the end, Oedipus is going to achieve a kind of grace and forgive his son, and his son will forgive him. But it doesn’t happen.
There’s a moment of silence where the son says, “You have to talk to me. You have to turn around and talk to me” and he doesn’t. It’s this incredible moment that makes one wonder, you know, what is forgiveness? What does it take for us as human beings to forgive, and what happens when we don’t forgive?
That moment really stood out to me, partly because the young people in this production are so strong and I think one of the things that we’re reckoning with, as a culture, is where we’ve left the young generation in every way—about AI, about education, about employment, about the climate. We have left teens and 20-somethings with this mess that we’ve created.
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