These Seven Sicknesses Review: Sophocles As A Party

“Welcome to blood, sex, sorrow and a good party,” a young man said cheerfully, as he handed out a drink during the Flea Theater’s adaptation of all seven surviving tragedies by Sophocles, a marathon evening that shouldn’t work, but does, wonderfully.

The young man who served me a drink, it turns out, is named Grant Harrison and he plays the title character in “Ajax,” the fifth play in “The Seven Sicknesses” and a stand-out – a good example of the magic rendered by adapter Sean Graney, director Ed Iskandar, and the 38-member cast, the Flea’s resident company known as The Bats.

In the Sophocles play, Ajax murders sheep that the goddess Athena has tricked him into thinking are rival soldiers (He wants them dead because one of them, Odysseus, was honored with the gift of the armor of the dead Achilles, which Ajax feels should have been given to him.) On discovering what he has done, out of shame, Ajax commits suicide. This leads to an argument among his enemies over whether they should bury Ajax despite a decree that his body remain above-ground to rot, with his rival Odysseus arguing successfully that he deserves such a burial.
A literal translation of “Ajax” would begin with a long, poetically-metered conversation between the goddess Athena and Odysseus, describing Ajax’s killing of the sheep.

In the Flea adaptation, some dozen sheep come baaaing onto the stage (little more than a corridor between the bleachers where the audience sits). Several rise, and become soldiers, Agamemnon giving Odysseus the armor of Achilles.

Ajax appears, incensed, and challenges them.

“Odysseus is not a better warrior than me,” he says.

“No Ajax. But good soldiers aren’t waaaaarriors,” Agamemnon replies, bleating. “…We need strategies, words, ideeeeeeeas.”

“You all shame me,” Ajax barks, and what follows is an intense scene of massacre — acrobatics accompanied by red strobe lights and pounding house music.

It is a testament to the depth and fire of the performances that after the massacre, when his wife Tekmessa tells Ajax that he in a fit of ill delusion has killed only sheep, the audience feels no amused modern distance, despite the whimsy of the initial scenes.

The Flea does a service just by exposing us to “Ajax,” far less known than “Electra” or “Antigone,” but it goes beyond that – entertaining us with the cleverness and excitement of the stagecraft, riveting us with the fierceness of the acting, and even stimulating us with the moral and intellectual dilemmas.

Not all of the plays in “These Seven Sicknesses” click on so many levels, even though the stories interconnect, and some characters are in several of them. Still, there are many fine performances in addition to Harrison’s, most memorably in the cast of Elektra. Betsy Lippitt as a punk mental patient Elektra teams up variously to great effect with Charlotte Bydwell as her princess of a sister, Ayiaa Wilson as her well-meaning murderous mother, and Erik Olson as her golden-boy, bloody incestuous brother Orestes. It is almost unfair, though, to single out individual performers in this huge cast. The ensemble is what makes the evening work so well; it wouldn’t be the same without the Greek chorus of nurses in starched-white uniform who speak up to explain things, clean up the blood and sing in-between plays, and perform the occasional amputation.

Sophoclean purists, if such exist, might object to the omissions (there is no Athena in “Ajax” for example); the truncating (no play is longer than half an hour); the liberal servings of gore (most of the mayhem in Greek tragedies occur off-stage; not here) and the persistent flattening of the language into American teen talk (“Are you, like, banishing me?” Creon asks Oedipus in the first play).

But whatever the plays lose in poetry they gain in clarity. The presentation here might be different than Sophocles intended, but the purpose of the apostasy is engagement for audiences who differ from those in Ancient Greece.
Because the audiences do differ, it is a stretch for director Iskandar, in a long note handed out to theatergoers, to invoke the dawn-to-dusk theatrical competitions in Ancient Athens as the reason to turn “The Seven Sicknesses” into an unusual kind of dinner theater. The actors serve dinner from a local restaurant during the first intermission and dessert from a local bakery during the second. But they are not just waiters; they turn into hosts, finding members of the audience with whom to converse. This, Iskander says, creates a “socially immersive theatrical event.” The food was fine, the actors were all charming, but I’m not sure I wanted to have a chat with people whom I had just seen bleed to death in a bathtub, or (worse!) would subsequently see commit murder and incest.

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These Seven Sicknesses

Adapted by Sean Graney from Sophocles, directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
At the Flea Theater, 41 White Street

Set design by Julia Noulin-Merat, lighting by Carl Wiemann, costumes by Loren Shaw, sound by Patrick Metzger, fight direction by Michael Wieser, music direction by David Dabbon, dramaturg, Greg VanHorn, stage managers, Edward Herman & Kara Kaufman.

Cast: Tiffany Abercrombie, Matt Barbot, Yoni Ben-Yehuda, Satomi Blair, Dave Brown, Allison Buck, Charlotte Bydwell, Holly Chou, Jenelle Chu, Ugo Chukwu, Alexander Cook, Tommy Crawford, Eloise Eonnet, Bobby Foley, Katherine Folk-Sullivan, Glenna Grant, Cleo Gray, Alex Grubbs, Grant Harrison, Victoria Haynes, Cameran Hebb, Alex Herrald, Miles Jacoby, Betsy Lippitt, Sean McIntyre, Kate Michaud, Seth Moore, Erik Olson, Victor Joel Ortiz, Jeff Ronan, Marie Claire Roussel, Olivia Stoker, Stephen Stout, Liz Tancredi, Will Turner, Tony Vo, Nate Washburn, and Akyiaa Wilson.

Running time is about 4 1/2 hours, including two intermissions, both of them catered.
Ticket prices: $40

“These Seven Sicknesses” is scheduled to run through February 26.