Sophocles filtered through Anthony Burgess’s manufactured tongue, performed in a converted military chapel on the San Francisco waterfront. May 2017. A staged reading, actors clutching scripts like life rafts while pretending they’re drowning in ancient Greek despair.
And you know what? There’s something almost obscene about the whole setup. Not obscene like shocking, obscene like accidentally true.
Because what is Oedipus if not the original “everything you thought you knew is a lie” story? You wake up thinking you’re the hero who beat the monster and saved the city. Then, slowly, with the methodical precision of a cancer spreading (their word, not mine), you discover you’ve been fucking your mother and the prophecy you ran from caught you anyway because it was you. You were the thing you were running from all along.
And Anthony Burgess, that clockwork orange brained madman, invents a language for it. Not content with translation, he needs something that sounds ancient and alien, that catches in your throat like you’re choking on syllables that predate meaning. Like he understood that sometimes the horror can’t be captured in English or Greek, that it needs its own sonic architecture of doom.
Fort Mason Chapel, though. That’s the real perverse poetry. A military chapel, where soldiers once prayed to come home whole, where God was supposed to be on our side. And into that space you drag Oedipus, walking proof that the universe doesn’t give a fuck about your prayers or righteousness, that the gods play with loaded dice.
What gets me is that phrase: “A new cancer appears and he is forced to save his people by rooting out the cause.” Because Oedipus is the detective and the criminal. The surgeon and the tumor. You can’t root out the cause without destroying yourself.
The tragedy isn’t that bad things happen. The tragedy is that you’re complicit in your own destruction and don’t know it until it’s too late. Every move you made to avoid this moment was actually a step toward it. Free will is just the name we give to choreography we can’t see.
And we’ll do this with invented language, in a military chapel, as a staged reading, for an arts festival.