philoktetes-1993-2007

Author's Note

The story of Philoktetes- the Greek warrior whose wound was so noxious that he was ostracized and banned to the uninhabited island of Lemnos by his comrades-in-arms while they journeyed to Troy. This play itself has made its own long strange journey before finally arriving in New York. But please don't think it's a tragic one. In 1993 Ron Vawter, then probably the most important actor of his generation in progressive American/European theater, asked me to write a version of Philoktetes for the project PhiloktetesVariations which would also use texts from Heiner Muller, Gide and Sophocles. Ron had AIDS. We sat at a cafe and he told me the story of Philoktetes. He gave me the Sophocles version and told me to read it and then just write whatever I wanted. I was relieved when he distinctly asked me NOT to read the 50 lb. box of research materials the theater had sent so as not to be influenced. He felt connected to the character at this tenuous point in his life. But not only because of the obvious "disease." He said he came to me because he didn't want a gay play, an AIDS play, a toga play and he didn't want a play about him- and that was about it. He loved my writing and I loved his acting so the race was on- a thrill and a challenge. We had a lot of dinners together but there was plenty we didn't have to talk about. We both had a real sense that for many of us our lives were going to change drastically within a short time. The concern at the cafe that day was with the transitory combinations of beauty and brutality beyond disease - and the very meaning of "disease." A day after it opened in 1994 at the Kaaitheater in Brussels "Philoktetes Variations" closed due to Ron's illness. He died a few weeks later on a plane flight back to New York. After Ron's death I put the play away. Since then Ron's instigation continues to produce the most unlikely and beautiful variations and he is present in all of them. In 1996 a version was done by the Norwegian group Verdensteatret. Various readings were done in NY, Amsterdam and Tokyo. In 2000 the play finally premiered in Spanish in Mexico City directed by Martin Acosta and translated by Mr. Acosta and myself at the Sundance Theater Lab. In 2004 I directed an English version at the Berliner Festspielhaus and in 2005 a Japanese production in Kyoto starring the late Noh theater legend Hideo Kanze. Philoktetes returned to the Kaaitheater/Brussels last winter.

TEXT EXCERPT

1. LISTEN TO ME

PHILOKTETES :

Listen to me, I’m telling you something.

So that you’ll learn the value of suffering,

The joy of sacrifice and patience, murder and

manslaughter.

So that you’ll learn to speak the language of

the dead.

Once again its time for you to shut up.

Belly up to the buzzsaw.

Gravitational collapse, Blackleg, Yankee pot

roast.

Stop crying. You should be happy.

Listen to me, I’m telling you something.

You tell someone else and they’ll tell someone

else.

This is what Philoktetes told me.

This is his suicide note, his poison-pen letter.

First, I’ll give the clue, then the story, then

the real story.

First what they saw, then what was seen,

Then what was.

The cadaver will direct the autopsy,

A talking corpse narrating,

A dead horse talking, a dead foot walking.

Philoktetes is dead. I was looking at him outside.

He had one fly on him. But that fly was tiny,

triumphant.

ODYSSEUS :

You have been found neither guilty nor innocent but

ou have been found.

PHILOKTETES :

Stop crying.

NEOPTOLEMUS :

What’s that dripping ?

PHILOKTETES :

Blood, urine, pieces of marijuana,

Carbon monoxide.

I’m sorry that he’s dead, all right ?

Once again it’s time for you to shut up.

NEOPTOLEMUS :

What’s that moving ?

PHILOKTETES :

A salamander come to eat the turnips.

I had wanted to tell you about my deep and

unrelenting and unequivocal disbelief and unbelief

in everything.

But now I have changed my mind.

Do you understand that ?

NEOPTOLEMUS :

What’s that dripping ?

PHILOKTETES :

Crocodile tears. I’d like to read a nice book now and

then with a story in the middle that goes nowhere.

Don’t you understand ?

He’s been murdered, killed.

His head hit a bullet.

Habeas corpus, a talking corpse.

NEOPTOLEMUS :

You were lost but now you’re found. I found you.

PHILOKTETES :

He’s pulverized, a smoke signal, a cat dream, a molly maguire.

NEOPTOLEMUS :

I don’t hear anything.

PHILOKTETES :

You’re fuckin’brain dead, that’s why.

A pack of flies is riding around in his head. That fly was tiny, triumphant. I promise.

This is my island. It’s beautiful. It’s always beautiful.

I love it.

At night it gets so dark you don’t know where you are.

In the day it’s hell, but at night, when everything else is asleep, it’s heaven.

NEOPTOLEMUS :

I don’t want to stay here.

PHILOKTETES :

Yes you do.

I’ll leave the bow here with you.

You can use it if you want.

But wait for one night and you won’t want to use it.

In the day you’ll feel like using it but at night you won’t.

Philoktetes loved it here.

Mushrooms grow here at night and you can eat them.

You’ll see so many things on this island, you won’t want to leave it.

You’ll be married to it.

You won’t be able to tell where the island begins and you end.

Let me see your hand. It’s afraid.

Don’t you like it here ?

NEOPTOLEMUS :

What’s that smell ?

PHILOKTETES :

Sour mash, camphor, apple rotting, bull blood.

Why are you here ?

NEOPTOLEMUS :

To find Philoktetes.

PHILOKTETES :

Why don’t you get out of here ? Philoktetes is

not here.

Let me tell you honestly, he isn’t here.

He’s dead, I told you.

But I have a bow and we can share it.

NEOPTOLEMUS :

I don’t want to.

PHILOKTETES :

Share the bow.

You take it and keep it.

ODYSSEUS :

Take it.

PHILOKTETES :

Stop arguing. What are you waiting for ? Can you

see the bow ?

You can only see it from one point on the island.

Who can see it ? Whoever can see it can have it.

Who can see it ? No one ?

One person can see the bow. No ?

So I built a house of cards to keep warm and I got

inside my house of cards and burn it.

And it kept me warm for a while.

A good long while.

I found that if I kept talking and kept very still,

I’d stay warm.

But then it got very lonely in that house.

But people shouldn’t be alone.

And I thought, I have these mushrooms

And if I can share them

Maybe it won’t be so lonely.

So I tried to share them with the birds,

But no one wanted to share them.

So I threw them into a river. And what did

you do ?

NEOPTOLEMUS :

Maybe you can help us.

PHILOKTETES :

What can I do for you ?

ODYSSEUS :

I was under the impression that Philoktetes was

here on this island where we left him.

PHILOKTETES :

No Philoktetes here. He’s dead.

Very hard to find.

So what did you do while he sat here rotting ?

What did you do ?

Don’t just sit there breathing, Neoptolemus.

You should be having the time of your life.

PRESS

Alisa Solomon, Guardian Unlimited

It's fitting that the brief run of John Jesurun's jagged gem, Philoktetes, overlapped in New York with the Wooster Group Hamlet. Jesurun wrote the play for Ron Vawter, the great Wooster Group actor who died of Aids in 1994 during preparations for a production that never was realised. This is the play's New York premiere.

Disconcerting and strangely beautiful, the play re-imagines the Trojan war myth as a tragic confrontation over masculinity, love, retribution and the limits of the human. According to the myth (most famously dramatised by Sophocles), the archer Philoktetes has been abandoned by his fellow soldiers on the island of Lemnos because of the intolerable stink of a suppurating wound on his foot. Realising that they need his magic bow to win the war, Odysseus and Neoptolemus come to the island and try to trick him into giving it up.

In Jesurun's hour-long, tough retelling, the characters are men out of time, neither mythic Greeks nor recognisably contemporary, but rather belonging only to the theatrical present. Their poetic language - lyrical and obscene - leaps between ancient and modern references, sampling the occasional song lyric or slang phrase as the men trade ever more intricate reproaches. Three young actors - Will Badgett, Jason Lew and most impressively Louis Cancelmi as Philoktetes - spit out their tirades without a trace of melodrama.

The visuals also create a sense of dislocation. Like LeCompte, Jesurun uses filmed backdrops and live video of the stage action. Here they vaguely suggest place - the shimmering surface of a pool, the windy movements of clouds across the sky - but are projected both on a back wall and on the floor, as if the world has been upended. Sometimes, the face of an actor appears live in close-up, a self detached and alienated from his body. When the scenic projections shift to bombs raining silently and you realise that ultimately, the men are arguing about how to get themselves back into the war, the play lurches into the present.

That this ancient story, refashioned during the Aids crisis a dozen years ago, feels as though it might have been written in response to the current war in Iraq, gives the production an urgency as bitter as it is surprising.

PRESS/SOHO REP.OCTOBER 2007 VILLAGE VOICE:

Iraq's Magic Bow

John Jesurun returns, with his own version of the Trojan War

by Michael Feingold

Take ancient Greek tragedy and the Iraq War, squeeze them together in a Dunkin' Donuts box, and the disconcerting, dangerously volatile object you find yourself holding will be the metaphoric equivalent of John Jesurun's Philoktetes, now at Soho Rep. See it performed and you'll find it setting off small detonations in your mind for days afterward. Like Charles Mee and others, Jesurun has found in the Trojan War myth an analogy for our own Middle Eastern disaster, but where Mee collages systematically, in chunks, Jesurun works insidiously, by what you might call cultural seepage. Philoktetes, the master archer, has cluelessly violated a sacred shrine and been punished with a snakebite wound that leaves him too malodorous for his fellow soldiers to tolerate; they abandon him on a deserted island, but can't win the war without his magic bow, so Odysseus and young Neoptolemus arrive to trick him out of it.

Sophocles, dramatizing the story, gave the three characters equal moral weight; Gide found existential virtue in it; Edmund Wilson read it as a parable of the creative psyche. Jesurun tests the myth against our corrupting, unprincipled time, structuring his scenes sequentially but wrenching them, cubistically, into patterns that question the narrative, delve deeper in it, or twist its context violently back and forth from ancient to modern. On his usual bare rectangle of stage, backed by projections of rippling water or falling bombs, his three actors spew out the firecracker-snappy exchanges and the brain-rattling, roller-coaster tirades that are the twin mirror balls in Jesurun's disco palace of wordplay. The combination of tragic matrix and political urgency gives the verbal frenzies exceptional stature. Death-haunted yet wackily funny, impossible to pin down to easy meanings, the work's reverberant, quicksilver flood of phrases is hypnotic on the ear and a tonic for the alert mind. Louis Cancelmi, a late replacement in the cast, barrels through the marathon title role with an assured intensity; that itself deserves a medal.

TIME OUT NYTime Out New York / Issue 630 : October 25, 2007 - October 31, 2007Review

Philoktetes

Soho Rep. Written and directed by John Jesurun. With ensemble cast. 1hr 15mins. No intermission.

The title character of Sophocles’ 409 B.C. drama is meant to be physically repugnant. Philoktetes is a Greek soldier whose festering foot wound (from a snakebite) became so vilely infected, his comrades, en route to Troy, dumped him on a desert island. When John Jesurun’s play begins, Philoktetes (Louis Cancelmi) has been tracked down by former comrades Odysseus (Will Badgett) and Neoptolemos (Jason Lew), who need his magical bow to win the Trojan War. Their wounded, cave-dwelling friend is understandably embittered—and probably smellier than ever. However, as played by the handsome, mesmeric Cancelmi, Philoktetes’ bodily rot has to be taken on faith.The actor’s beauty is not writer-director Jesurun’s only instance of poetic license with the myth. He sets his modern version in a minimalist video-mediated dreamscape: three chairs, two large screens and three actors in modern dress standing very still and speaking their trippy text with hypnotic precision. A camera upstage center broadcasts large images overhead. The enchanted bow is represented, I think, by a length of red fabric. Jesurun is a downtown veteran who has been disorienting audiences with his surreal stage poetry since the ’80s. This Philoktetes was written in 1993 (commissioned by the late Ron Vawter while he was dying of AIDS), and is only now getting its American premiere. The language is intoxicatingly rich, veering from free-associating weirdness to bitchy vituperation, and takes shots at warmongering, disloyalty, body horror, disease and more. The title character’s speeches, like his putrefaction, remain abstract; all the same, they could infect your mind.

David Cote

THEATERMANIA

Philoktetes

Reviewed By: Andy Propst

Philoktetes, the Greek warrior unceremoniously left on a desert island en route to Troy, may be one of the lesser-known figures from the classics, yet his story has fascinated writers from Derek Walcott to Andre Gide to Heiner Müller. Theatre auteur John Jesurun is the latest artist to put a contemporary stamp on this tale with Philoktetes, an entrancingly satisfying drama now on view at Soho Rep.

According to legend, midway through the Trojan War, Odysseus and Neoptolemus returned for their old comrade Philoktetes, whom they left behind because of a festering, foul-smelling snakebite. They need the weapon he carries, a bow once belonging to Hercules, in order to win the war, according to the prophecy of an oracle. However, after years of solitude -- in which his resentments and anger have grown -- Philoktetes is not necessarily receptive to Odysseus and Neoptolemus' request.

Jesurun's lyrical and pointedly political modern-dress play uses the central conflict between Philoktetes (Louis Cancelmi), Odysseus (Will Badgett), and Neoptolemus (Jason Lew) to investigate a wide variety of themes. Most interestingly, the question of true masculinity arises again and again as the haughty Odysseus and naïve Neoptolemus badger Philoktetes, who alternates between haughty arrogance and taciturn petulance. At times, the two soldiers imply that Philoktetes' wound somehow makes him less of a man, and that perhaps if he had been able to endure the pain more stoically, the three might not find themselves at this difficult juncture.

Equally intriguing -- and this is where Jesurun's script invokes variations on the myth -- are Odysseus and Neoptolemus' implications about Philoktetes' morality, implying that a deviation from the societal norm might have had something to do not only with the reason for Philoktetes' wound but also the Greeks' subsequent actions. Without ever using the words "Don't ask, don't tell," Philoktetes manages to indict the way in which the U.S. military treats its gay and lesbian soldiers.

The production also causes theatergoers to contemplate the current war in Iraq. At one point, Neoptolemus moves upstage and stares into an unseen video camera, which projects his image surrounded by what look like twinkling stars onto the screen that backs the stage. When Neoptolemus moves away from the camera as Odysseus and Philoktetes verbally spar, theatergoers come to realize that the "stars" in actuality are bombs bursting in mid-air -- nighttime video footage of a modern-day war that bring to mind the first attacks on Baghdad.

Later in the play, when Odysseus most aggressively confronts Philoktetes about his wound and unwillingness to support the Greeks' continued campaign against Troy, it's difficult to not think of reports of contemporary interrogations and anticipate torture (which never comes) as Odysseus carefully and purposefully removes his dark suit coat and rolls up his shirt sleeves.

Jesurun's ability to shift audiences' minds from the specifics of the tale to the world in which we live lies in the complexly layered nearly stream-of-conscious language used throughout the play. A phrase like "Yankee pot roast" may jar initially, but it also has an incredible resonance that somehow makes these characters seem familiar. As Philoktetes damns the Greeks' campaign against the war which is killing scores of "beautiful boys" who come home in body bags, thoughts instantly turn toward the most recent reports of casualties in the Middle East.

Similarly, Jesurun's script sends chills down the spine as Philoktetes and Odysseus heatedly debate while sipping scotch, seemingly at the posh hotel's pool (indicated by swirling water in Jesurun's ever-shifting video landscape for the piece).

Jesurun elicits a wonderfully subtle performance from Cancelmi, who mesmerizes throughout as a soft-spoken but assured Philoktetes. Badgett gives a performance of equal assurance as the uncompromising Greek general Odysseus. Lew gracefully traverses what is perhaps the trickiest arc in the play, transforming from soft young man to hardened soldier with graceful and convincing ease; its quite disconcerting and distressing to watch as the handsome young man dons a dark suit and tie similar to Odysseus' outfit.

As the piece ends, theatergoers may feel slight shudders in their spines. These tremors will pass, but the imagery and ideas of Philoktetes remain well after the performance has ended.