Philoctetes, that poor bastard marooned on Lemnos with nothing but his festering wound and his famous bow, becomes this perfect metaphor for anyone who’s ever been discarded by the machinery. The Aeschylus fragment’s almost gone, just scraps really, which makes it even more tragic because we’re left rehearsing ghosts under some absurd totem pole like we can summon what’s been lost.
The guy gets dumped because he stinks, because his suffering makes the warriors uncomfortable on their way to Troy. There’s something so brutally honest about that: the hero with the magic weapon nobody wants around because pain embarrasses the living.
What we’ve got left are fragments rehearsing other fragments: and Jeff Schwartz channeling a character from a mostly lost play about abandonment and necessity, performing under carved wood that’s probably someone else’s cultural monument entirely. The whole spectacle becomes this layered archaeology of wanting: wanting the play back, wanting Philoctetes heard, wanting art to matter again. The wound never heals, but maybe the rehearsal itself is the point: the perpetual return to pain as the only genuine thing left.