So here’s the thing about these images: they’re documentation masquerading as art, or maybe art pretending to be documentation, that beautiful, fucked-up place where nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore. Rush Rehm’s doing Euripides like it still matters, like these 2,400-year-old words about women destroyed by war and men destroyed by their own certainty could punch through the academic fog and land in somebody’s gut. And maybe they did. And Rush, probably the best professor in the full sense of that word I had at Stanford, undergrad and grad school both, understands that Greek tragedy isn’t some dusty artifact for seminar dissection but a living thing that should still draw blood if you stage it right.
The chorus, Aleta Hayes choreographing bodies into geometry, into this collective organism that Greek tragedy demands, they’re reaching for something primal in a gym that still smells like institutional disinfectant and forgotten athletic ambitions. The lighting’s harsh, unforgiving, the kind that exposes every tremor and doubt. There’s nothing precious here. It’s raw. Bodies contorting, faces caught mid-transformation between character and actor, that liminal space where performance becomes possession or at least convincing desperation. The chorus formations look like suppliants, like refugees, like every displaced person who ever begged indifferent gods or governments for mercy they weren’t going to get. These women steel show.
Stanford Repertory Theater, this presumably well-funded machine of culture-making, stripping Greek tragedy down to movement and text in what looks like borrowed space. There’s something honest in that poverty, that refusal of spectacle in favor of the thing itself. Hecuba and Helen, two women defined entirely by male violence, by being taken, used, blamed, mourned. And here we are, still staging their grief, still trying to locate meaning in catastrophe. Still believing, against considerable evidence, that theatre can do something beyond entertaining the already comfortable, that it might actually remember how to wound us into recognition.