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Review: Oedipus Complex
A window to fractured psyches.
Riveting 'Oedipus Complex' forces us to acknowledge our twisted urges
Taken from the May 9, 2007 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times
May 9, 2007
BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic
The term "primal" is used with such casualness these days that its true meaning -- the fearsome rawness of incestuous desire and brutality buried deep within human nature -- often seems lost, or at least diluted. Among the many achievements of adapter-director Frank Galati's fascinating "Oedipus Complex" -- which opened Monday at the Goodman Theatre in a fiercely envisioned, searingly acted production -- is the way it restores the mystery, terror and compulsion embodied in that word.
Intellectually and emotionally provocative, and altogether riveting in its black-on-black, midnight-of-the-soul visual design (applause for designers James Schuette and Michael Chybowski), the show conjures the most ancient myth of twisted desire and guilt by way of Sophocles' Greek tragedy "Oedipus Rex," in which a man is fated to murder his father and marry his mother. It also conflates this seminal tale with Sigmund Freud's early 20th century theories about the psychosexual urges present, to varying degrees, in every human. The result is a modern, fractured mirror through which the story can be seen from multiple perspectives.
The play comes to life in a late Victorian lecture hall where Freud (Nick Sandys, with his precise diction and gentlemanly aura) draws us into the upheaval of his theater-of-the-mind. As he peers into his own childhood traumas (a corrupting nurse, a father impotent in the face of anti-Semitism, a glimpse of his nude mother), the story of Oedipus (Ben Viccellio, sensual and full of urgency) unfolds. A "Greek chorus" of 14 Victorian gentlemen (with goatees and black morning coats identical to Freud's) supplies the magnificent, fiercely poetic commentary. The inevitability of the outcome echoes back and forth between the centuries.
Galati has commandeered a huge contingent of this city's most accomplished actors, with outstanding turns by Jeffrey Baumgartner (as the caustic prophet Teiresias), Roderick Peeples (a coolly deceptive Kreon, king in waiting) and Brad Armacost and Patrick Clear as shepherds who know too much.
The show has too many endings. The chorus' furious rush into consciousness is so breathtaking, there's no need for another word. Only awe.
THEATER REVIEW
Oedipus Complex
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
When: Through June 3
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn
Tickets: $20-$68
Call: (312) 443-3800
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