Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses

Chopin Theatre

Chicago

****

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There’s no doubt about it: Sophocles understood “the colossally demented mess human beings make of things,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. So does the Chicago company the Hypocrites—which is why, after seeing this nearly four-hour display of “monumental violence, selfishness, lies, betrayals, egotism, envy,” and overall madness, you cannot help but laugh at the “maniacal absurdity of it all.” In a basement setting that resembles a warped emergency room, director Sean Graney stages briskly abbreviated versions of all seven of Sophocles’s surviving plays, with two cynical Red Cross nurses serving as the Greek chorus. The most familiar works—Oedipus Rex and Elektra—serve as bookends, and the “unending cycle of carnage and revenge” in between is punctuated by slivers of songs from Bruce Springsteen’s album The River.

Seven Sicknesses is the kind of daring work that “can emerge only when a director has complete freedom,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. People generally go see Greek dramas hoping to experience their “timeless power,” and Graney’s darkly comedic vision “gives you gobs of that.” He’s helped by a “trio of gripping, gutsy performances” from Erin Barlow, Tien Doman, and Lindsey Gavel, who play all the female roles. Sophocles was perhaps the first playwright to create strong female characters. Here, each one, from Barlow’s frighteningly determined Antigone to Gavel’s feral Elektra, is “on fire.” A great deal of hubris was required to get Graney’s production onstage, but the effort has yielded “one heck of an achievement.”