GOSPEL in Millennia: Dramaturgy Article 

When Charlie and I first met to discuss the dramaturgy for The Gospel at Colonus in February, he recounted the soul-stirring experience of seeing its premiere production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in 1983. I could hear a swell in his voice as his memory lifted his words and phrases and then folded softly back, settling into the present on a mild Wednesday afternoon. His tale was not unlike Sophocles' verse - "smooth, pure, and felicitous," as observed by American poet and classics scholar Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone provided the textual foundation of Lee Breuer's adaptation. 

Charlie confided to me that his decades-long artistic journey is anchored to that performance of Gospel. It made me wonder, if our ancient sources are true, that the fifteen-year-old Sophocles led the paean celebrating Athenian victory in the decisive Battle of Salamis over Persian fleets in 480 B.C.E., had he experienced a similar swell in his body? Had that feeling propelled him to compose 123 plays over the next seventy years, until the last work at the end of his life, Oedipus at Colonus? 

Sophocles lived through the Golden Age of Athens. Following the Greek city-states' victory in the Persian Wars, Athens established itself as Greece's intellectual and artistic center but also a despotic presence in the region, demanding loyalty and tributary from its allies until the Peloponnese cities led by Sparta provoked a war in 431 B.C.E, which lasted 27 years and ended in Athenian defeat. Sophocles witnessed it almost to the end: he passed away at ninety in 406 B.C.E., before his beloved city starved into surrender in 404 B.C.E. 

For every nation that lives peaceably,

Another will grow hard and push its arrogance,

Put off God and turn to madness. Fear not.

God attends to these things slowly; but he attends.

 -Oedipus at Colonus/Gospel at Colonus

Oedipus at Colonus was only staged after his death, around 402 B.C.E. By then, Oedipus' blessing to the city had worn off, their glorious days long gone, but the Athenians still held their theatre festivals honoring Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. Sparta had spared Athens from destruction, and although time eventually ground the city into dust, some relics of Sophocles' Athens remained in their sculptural forms. 

It could be such a stone that Lee Breuer stumbled on while wandering around the archeological site of a Greek theatre. "What's this stone?" he asked, and a person said, "It's the altar." 

Breuer wrote in 1999 that The Gospel at Colonus took shape in this moment, when it dawned on him that this stone was a church, that "tragedy is the church, and that it is the connection to a church that is cathartic." As per Breuer's instruction, to remember the ancient and the mythical, we have to feel - "when you emotionally identify, when you are moved, yours is the way of catharsis."

Breuer's Gospel brought its audience to this swelling emotion in the setting of a Black Pentecostal Church. It was an ecstatic spiritual experience in which the framework of a gospel service assumed the role of the ancient Greek chorus, mediating the audience's reaction to Sophocles' drama. Therefore, although Breuer's chorus had few movements onstage compared to their classical counterpart, audiences were dancing, crying, laughing, imbued with the way of catharsis. 

Breuer's Gospel was an ambitious project consecrating a new "American classicism." This grandiose vision of Breuer's, complicit in a neocolonial cultural hegemony and oblivious to certain histories of racial violence in the United States, nonetheless proved that an "American expression" is intrinsically tied to the Black American experience, symbolized by the Pentecostal Church in The Gospel at Colonus. Breuer also neglected an essential aspect of gospel music - its subversion of American racial politics, from slavery to Jim Crow. This insurgent spirit is central to our production of The Gospel at Colonus in Chicago, in 2023. 

During the Great Migration from 1910 to 1970, Chicago was the "promised land" for millions of African Americans in the South. Like Oedipus, they embarked on a journey to "live where they can," bringing jazz, blues, and African spirituals to Chicago. Their vibrant social and cultural lives invigorated the city and erected a Black Metropolis. Moreover, with the invention of gospel music, Black Chicagoans sang the truth of the Bible, the Christian message of redemption and liberation, in total submission to God. 

Perhaps the Athenian chorus sang to Dionysus with the same embodied, participatory ecstasy in the face of their militant Spartan conquerors? By tracing Black Chicago's place in history to its foundation, we encounter more ancestral resonance.

In the preface to his translation of Oedipus at Colonus, Nick Rudall, the founding director of Court Theatre, summarized it as a "supplicant" play that unfolds around Oedipus' plea to the gods and people native of Colonus, who grant him sanctuary in return. Now, let's imagine the Grove of the Furies morphing into Lake Michigan, which had, for millennia, been sacred to indigenous people of the Council of the Three Fires: the Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations, and many other tribes like the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox. In 1778, Kitihawa, a Potawatomi woman, married Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, and convinced her people to accept him as a Potawatomi kin. DuSable, of French and African descent, became the first non-native permanent settler on the land. Their family lived on the north bank of the Chicago River at its junction with Lake Michigan and ran a thriving trading post. For the next two centuries, countless non-native settlers would tread the land, build railroads, open factories, erect skyscrapers, and displace the Midwest's largest indigenous population. 

Chicago has flourished on the backs of its Black and Indigenous roots into a modern city rich in spirits, miracles, and laments. It grows while it sheds. It gives while it receives. It is a sacred ground for us and all who once came, lived, and rested here, whom we call ancestors. Sophocles was writing 25 hundred years a ago in Athens in the 5th century B.C.E about the myths of Oedipus in the Bronze Age, two thousand years before his time. We always have more history and stories to reflect on, especially those that appeal to our spirituality and connect our mortal lives to the divine. It is never too early or late to look back.

Oedipus' final hour at Colonus was only part of Sophocles' trilogy. Court Theatre staged Oedipus Rex in 2019, and Antigone will bring us back to Thebes in the near future. With the shifting scenes, Lake Michigan might appear as Mount Cithaeron, where baby Oedipus was left to die yet rescued by the shepherd, or as the cave where Antigone ended her life. Regardless, Chicago is the city where our lives take place and the lens by which we find resonance with ages past and lands far away. 

Much Love,

Coco & Gabby

3/30/2023