The Sol Project's Heated "Oedipus El Rey," Anna Ziegler's Tepid-to-Warm "The Last Match"

The Sol Project's Heated "Oedipus El Rey," Anna Ziegler's Tepid-to-Warm "The Last Match"
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Classic plays are always reconsidered in terms of the time in which they’re revived. Right now, it’s understandable that minority groups are claiming plays that long may have been considered out of their purview for one reason or another. Nevertheless, plays with themes always thought universal are obviously ripe for productions.

Whether Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex—where the title character kills his father, marries his mother and, when he realizes what he’s done, has her blind him and then commit suicide—is universally accepted means nothing, really. It should be.

Now the Sol Project, in cooperation with the Public Theater, has turned it into what they label a “Latinx” property. They’ve renamed Oedipus El Rey, and Luis Alfaro has adapted it. Under Chay Yew’s direction, it’s become a modern-day tragedy as put on by a group of orange-garbed prisoners who refer, for instance to the ”barrio.”

(Note: Phyllida Lloyd has been doing much the same thing with her all-women William Shakespeare trilogy.)

With shifting panels of prison bars set designer Riccardo Hernandez supplies (in front of a stunning graffiti-like mural), chiseled Juan Castano is the Oedipus, who, when Tiresias prophesies he has an unfortunate future, dismisses it. Then in time he slaughters the man he meets on the road without realizing it’s his father Laius (Juan Francisco Villa). All but immediately he unites with Jocasta (Sandra Delgado), whom he has no hint is his mother.

Director Yew sees to it that Sophocles rewired remains as fiery as it normally is. Indeed, sequences may be—since they’re minus the unchanging masks with which the play was initially presented—are even more passionate than ever.

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When a play about a tennis Grand Slam tournament semi-final is called The Last Match—as Anna Ziegler’s is, at the Laura Pels—you have to know going in that it’s not going to end after a single game or set. You know for sure that this is a play and therefore won’t at all be a straight-set affair.

Oh, no, you know from the first serve that this is a play for which dramatic tension is paramount and so will unquestionably stretch to five sets and then stretch farther to a tiebreaker.

Furthermore, while watching the way Ziegler handles protagonists Tim (Wilson Bethel) and Sergei (Alex Mickiewicz), you begin to get an inkling about how that tiebreaker will be resolved. This also predictable outcome won’t be sketched in here, however.

So since playwright Ziegler quickly tips her hand, she’s obliged to make unceasingly compelling the relationships between Tim and Sergei, between Tim and wife Mallory (Zoe Winters) and between Sergei and longtime girlfriend Galina (Natalia Payne). She’s done well with Tim and Mallory, who replay marital difficulties in between court action. She does less well with Sergei and Galina.

It’s also up to director Gaye Taylor Upchurch to keep the court contest hopping, which she definitely does, as energetic Bethel and Mickiewicz lurch about on Tim Mackabee’s idealized Flushing Meadow-like set. She’s done more than well with all four actors.

And since the playing is mimed, soundman Bray Poor makes a major contribution with the bouncing balls and the balls racketing off the unseen rackets. Those effects are truly impressive.

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