Big Love (review)

Big Love. By Charles L. Mee. Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Berkeley, California. 27 April 2001.

In the first half of 2001, Berkeley Repertory Theatre staged both Robert Fagles's translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia and Charles Mee's Big Love, an adaptation of Aeschylus' Danaid tetralogy. If this sudden grouping of Aeschylean tragedy had been a formal festival, Mee's dense but free-flowing one act adaptation would have easily taken first prize. The Suppliants, once considered the oldest extant Greek tragedy, is the surviving first play of Aeschylus' tetralogy; only fragments remain of the other plays. The narrative that Aeschylus treats is often described as the classic war of the sexes, but fortunately, in Mee's hands, nothing is that simple.

In Big Love, Mee seizes the opportunity afforded by Aeschylus to create a poetic and polemical meditation on love. Aeschylus' play takes up the legend of the fifty daughters of Daneus (the Danae) and the fifty sons of Daneus' brother Aigyptos. The sons of Aigyptos demand that their cousins marry them, but the Danae do not agree. They flee from Egypt to Argos and demand protection, threatening suicide. The brothers arrive and force the sisters to marry them anyway, but the Danae make a pact to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Forty-nine go through with it; one falls in love and spares her husband. To a certain extent, Big Love explores how and why such a thing might happen and what the consequences would be; but more so, Mee's play attempts to figure out the nature of love.

The pink padded vinyl covering the floor of Berkeley Rep's thrust stage stands out in strange contrast to--and yet in surprising harmony with--the sections of graceful terracotta stucco walls and backdrops of cloud-dusted blue, blue sky occupying the upstage space. Scenic designer Annie Smart chose the color of the vinyl wisely because it carries multiple significations that resonate with the variety of discourse present in the play. It immediately brings to mind Barbie, but also bubble gum--and Pepto Bismal. Most of the discourse on love (and the opposite sex) comes from the synecdochical trios of sisters (Lydia, Olympia, and Thyona) and their cousins/prospective husbands (Nikos, Oed, and Constantine). Mee spreads each of the three pairs across the cultural spectrum of sexual politics. Thyona and Constantine sit at one extreme. Played as grounded, fiery, and sincere by K. J. Sanchez, Thyona peppers her despairing arguments with statements like "boy babies should be flushed down the toilet at birth," while Constantine (a complexity of red-faced bravado and rationality in Mark Zeisler's portrayal) concludes at one point that a man raping a woman should be respected "for informing her about what it is that civilization really contains." Olympia and Oed occupy another extreme. Aimée Guillot's bubbly-but-dignified Olympia wants to be protected yet respected by a man and enjoys wearing a short skirt in order to play the game of love. Oed is the tall, dark, and handsome, strong but silent type, realized by J. Matthew Jenkins in a modicum of lines. Carolyn Baeumier's wary and energetic Lydia and Bruce McKenzie's Nikos, charming but square with his guileless Newhartian stammer, make up the middle ground, and they are fittingly the two that end up falling in love. Happily, neither Mee's play nor Les Waters's adept staging is all talk. The production bustles with a proud theatricality, exemplified by scenes in which characters rant themselves into a fervor, leaping into the air and plummeting to the ground again and again in synchronicity with music that eventually drowns out their words.

In this heterosexual war of love, two characters seem to occupy other discourses by virtue of their marginal positions to marriage. Both seem, from a certain angle, sketched in stereotype: Bella (Lauren Klein), the wise, old, widowed Italian grandmother; and Giuliano (Tony Speciale), the darling gay mamma's boy. Yet each also relates jarringly specific...