Tagged — Jamie Lyons
You want to talk about Oedipus Rex? Fine. It's not a detective story, though everyone treats it like some ancient episode of Law & Order: Thebes. It's a systematic dismantling of everything you think you know about control, about rational thought, about the possibility of outrunning your own shadow. Sophocles takes this king (this smart, successful, problem-solving son of a bitch) and watches him unravel thread by thread until there's nothing left but blood and screaming and a truth so ugly you can't look at it straight on.
The Greeks had this word, anagnorisis: recognition, the moment when everything clicks into horrible focus. Sophocles was the master of that gut-punch revelation. Not the cheap kind, not the twist-ending bullshit. The real thing. The kind that makes you reassess every single assumption you walked in with. Antigone isn't about some rebel girl making a political statement; it's about what happens when every law, human and divine, starts eating itself alive and nobody (nobody) walks away clean.
Three playwrights competed every year at the festivals. Three. And this guy won something like twenty-four times. You don't rack up that kind of score by playing it safe. He innovated: added a third actor, which sounds trivial until you realize it let him create actual conflict on stage instead of just narration. He made the chorus secondary to the characters. He took the raw, sprawling myth-tradition of Greece and carved it down to its bleeding essentials.
And here's what kills me: we've lost most of his work. Seven complete plays out of maybe 120. Seven. The rest is fragments, references, scholarly guesswork. But those seven? They're enough to remind you that 2,400 years ago, some Athenian understood human nature better than most people alive today. He knew we're all walking toward disaster with our eyes wide open, convinced we're headed somewhere else entirely. That's not pessimism. That's clarity. That's Sophocles.
Engineering 2021
The Fragment For … shines out in time of need like fine bronze; but if the house is neglected, it collapses. California doesn’t get summer storms. Not real ones. The state runs on a different weather pattern, a different logic. Dry summers, wet winters, and nine months of the year where rain is something you […]
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Engineering 2020
On the evening of March 9th, 2020, right before the world went to absolute shit, we’re doing something that has no business being as cool as it was. We staged a fragment of Sophocles‘ Laocoön at the Berkeley Art Museum. Berkeley. My first memories are from these streets, this place. Coming back here to do […]
ReadSpeculation 2020
What we’ve got here is me hauling a fragment of a lost Sophocles tragedy into BAMPFA like I’m smuggling contraband across time itself, rehearsing in the actual space where this thing’s going to live or die. Babatunji’s wrestling with Laocoon, not the marble version sitting in the Ufizzi, the breathing, screaming one, while Aleta’s working […]
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Engineering 2017
The Fragment he blows no longer on small pipes, but with savage blasts, without a mouthpiece. Three lines of Sophocles, three lousy lines that survived when 96 percent of his work got swallowed by time. This fragment doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be encountered. So I picked the Wave Organ, this broken-ass […]
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Engineering 2017
John Warren Travis’ Design for Oedipus Rag There’s something absolutely primal, something that cuts through all the academic horseshit, about staging Sophocles in a chapel at Fort Mason. I’ve seen Greek tragedy done in every godforsaken venue from The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus to prosceniums that smell like 1950s cigarettes to black box theaters where […]
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Speculation 2017
Oedipus and Tiresias (Nathaniel Justiniano and Tonyanna Borkovi) rehearsing for a site specific staged reading of Anthony Burgess’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus The King to be performed in the Fort Mason Chapel for the San Francisco International Art Festival and produced by the Museum of Performance and Design Oedipus and Tiresias walk into a Japantown […]
ReadEngineering 2016
July 10th, 2016. 1:08 in the afternoon. Pillar Point. Seventy two degrees, California sun beating down, the beach looking out at Mavericks, that legendary, bone crushing surf break where waves rise up like mountains and gods go to die, and we’re about to do something beautifully, almost stupidly ambitious: perform what’s left of a play […]
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Speculation 2016
rehearsing Sophocles Nausicäa in Stanford TAPS Prosser Studio Poseidon god of the earthquake launched a colossal wave, terrible, murderous, arching over him, pounding down on him, hard as a windstorm blasting piles of dry parched chaff, scattering flying husks… The Odyssey, Robert Fagles trans.
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Speculation 2016
Speculation: Rehearsing Sophocles #116. Fantastic rehearsal/experimentation/playing/imagining with amazing people at sunrise under a full moon… for Sophocles Savage Blasts. Here’s what the photographs don’t tell you: it’s cold as hell out there at the Wave Organ at dawn. The bay doesn’t care about your artistic intentions. The concrete under your feet is unforgiving, and the […]
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Engineering 2015
Speechless Fish, I call it. Informally. Because sometimes the informal is all you’ve got when you’re dealing with theatrical ghosts that ancient, scraps of text that survived fires, floods, the general amnesia of civilization. This is part of something bigger, something I’m calling IOTA, which sounds either pretentious as hell or like the most honest […]
ReadCollusion 2015
Three of us got together one October night and decided to fuck with Sophocles in a bathtub… spiritually, archaeologically, perversely. Rebecca Ormiston, Ryan Tacata, and I took one measly line from a dead Greek’s lost play and turned it into something called Cloud Talk for this outfit we hoped would be called Artist Weather TV, […]
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