To You, The Birdie! (Phedre) (review)

Jean Racine's Phèdre et Hippolyte was first performed in 1677, with Racine's mistress, La Champmelée, in the title role. It was a terrible flop. Pradon, a mediocre writer loyal to Racine's neo-classical nemesis, Corneille, had simultaneously produced his own version of the play and momentarily triumphed. Racine left Paris and the stage for twelve years. During this time, he became the king's historiographer, married, and devoted himself to religious practice. But when the Comedie Française was first founded in 1680, Phèdre was the first play to be produced.

Long considered the masterpiece of French classical literature, Phèdre, along with Racine's other eleven plays have not fared well outside of France. The neo-classical Alexandrine is a near-impossible poetic convention to translate. In the vernacular, it is muscular and smart. In translation, the baroque splendor of Racine's verse comes across as deadly logorrhea.

Unlike Shakespeare's populist theatricality, much of Racine's drama resides in the art of description. His plays were written for a court culture used to reading and eager to decipher through aphorisms the verbal behavior of his characters. Verisimilitude and the rules of decorum were state sponsored; stage actions were credible only if properly befitting rank. Similarly, in a genre in which language is action, actors were called upon to declaim rather than to perform their parts. First and foremost, the apparatus of tragedy served to put into relief the intimate pain of royal figures for whom the requirements of living in the private body of their passions cancelled out their ability to live in the public body of their caste. In Racine—unlike Euripides and Seneca—Phèdre is bound by the moral rectitude of an idealized court ethos. It is no longer Phèdre who accuses Hippolytus, but her confidante Oenone. The French Hippolyte is not accused of rape, but merely of having thought of it.

The semiotic richness of Racine's work galvanized post-Second World War French intellectuals who recognized in his plays a profoundly modern pattern of obsessions, a fascination with (self-) alienation and the unconscious. Racine's cubistic optic was compared to the symbolists, even to Artaud. When he was not being championed as an existentialist, he was hailed at a postmodern. Roland Barthes's heady conclusion in On Racine, that "Racinian tragedy is merely a failure that speaks itself" echoes Beckett's self-acknowledged debt to the author of Phèdre.

The Wooster Group's To You, The Birdie! based on a compact translation by Paul Schmidt baldly exposes all that in Racine is unseen and aphoristic. Elisabeth LeCompte and her company pry open the fantasmatic underbelly of Racine's poetic anatomy with a vengeance. To say that To You, The Birdie! is an evisceration of neo-classical decorum is to put it mildly. Two metaphors reign supreme in this posh, futuristic health spa for an ailing civilization that is LeCompte's reimagined Trozen: Phèdre's frequent and agonizing bowel movements and the macabre athletic regime of the badminton court. These literalizations of seventeenth-century court rituals—the performance of love's physical ravages (replete with enemas and bed pans) and "playing the game" of politics-as-sport—are incomparable ways of back-reading the signifiers of neo-classical myth making.

Beneath the frenetic surface level of the Wooster Group's anti-mimetic gymnastics is a dazzling distillation of the politics of tragic ethos. How the characters play the game of badminton says everything about where they stand on the scales of fate. Hippolytus (Ari Fliakos) is a pro with a temper. Théramenes (Scott Shepard), his friend and tutor, hits the birdie with aggressive, military precision. Anemic Phèdre, played with exquisite timing and histrionic countenance by Kate Valk cannot even hold the racket. All the while, Venus (Susie Roche), in a mechanical...