Breaking the cycle Brown’s The Greeks is action-packed BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	BACK STAGE It wasn’t just the usual hometown advantage that put Trinity Rep’s associate artistic director Amanda Dehnert, 32, among the three finalists for the big search. A 1997 Trinity Conservatory graduate in directing, she was immediately tapped by Oskar Eustis for plum directing assignments. Her background in music was largely behind the decision for the company to stage numerous successful musicals in recent years. Dehnert is obviously headed to become artistic director somewhere significant, if not in Providence just yet. She took the appointment of Columbus with good grace. "I think it’s a great opportunity for Trinity Rep, and I totally support the search committee’s decision," Dehnert said. "I hope that in my interim position I was able to make a positive impact, and I’m looking forward to being able to pass that over and work to keep bringing the theater forward." On the search committee, Tim Crowe, along with Trinity veteran Barbara Meek, represented the acting company that he’s belonged to since 1970. Columbus is a good listener, Crowe pointed out, which was evident in the more than two hours spent with the actors on his most recent visit. "It was a very thorough search," Crowe said. "Curt won everybody with his humanity and with his passion for the theater." "The word on him from Chicago was universally not only positive but glowing," he added. "Not only for his theatrical taste and skill and talent, but for him as a person. He is regarded as a mensch and a mentor. We constantly got back from the Chicago area: ‘You’re lucky to get him’ and ‘We are so sorry to lose him.’ " Oskar Eustis, who led Trinity for 11 years, says that of the candidates whose names came up in the search process, Columbus is the only one he’s never met. But he echoes the word from Chicago, saying that his colleagues there "give him high marks for brains, for creativity, for genuine interest in community, for interest in developing and maintaining the acting company, for ability to create and forge alliances with universities." What advice does he have for his successor? "I would say never underestimate the intelligence of the Providence audience. Be absolutely blunt about doing what you think the right thing to do is, but at the same time do whatever you can become a real part of the community, because ultimately Trinity is only as powerful as it is really embedded in the community that it serves." MEANWHILE, AT PERISHABLE . . . Is Perishable Theatre living up to its name? No way, says board chair Jill Jaffe. "We’re not going away." Nevertheless, it was a shock to have hot new artistic director Jason Nodler come in from Houston this June with exciting and ambitious ideas for the theater, to see two dazzling productions that he directed, and then to have an announcement come out four weeks ago that he was leaving. A press release was issued, its phrasing agreed upon by both the board of trustees and Nodler. It came down hard on the theater’s share of responsibility for the skid marks on Empire Street, stating that "it has become apparent that the theatre’s financial situation is not as stable as Perishable led Jason to believe and the Board of Trustees have concluded that they will not be able to provide Jason with the resources he needs to bring his vision to this stage. In hindsight, it was premature to consider hiring a new artistic director before a complete assessment of Perishable’s current fiscal year could be accomplished." Quite a mea culpa. What else besides finances led to his leaving? "It wasn’t a good fit for both of us," the board chair says. "He was the theater and the theater was him. We had differing ideas." But that was then and this is now. What about the future of Perishable? "The direction of the theater will be as it always has been, dedicated to doing works of emerging playwrights," Jaffe says. Also, "We’re exploring — I don’t want to use the word merger — we’re exploring any kind of synergistic relationships with other organizations, including with our capital campaign partner AS220." Who’s calling the shots now? "Well, as board chair I will be," Jaffe says. "Through the end of this calendar year." The theater’s next production will be announced shortly. There will be, Perishable assures us, many more to follow. _B.R.

Those who refuse to learn from literature will have to relive history.

A finely honed adaptation of John Barton and Kenneth Cavander’s The Greeks, retitled The Greeks/The Murders, has cut through the subplots of nine plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to thump the bloody heart of the matter onto the stage: war is all we need to know of hell, revenge is its perpetual motion machine, and the blame is within each of us.

Brown University Theater and Sock & Buskin are wrestling these sprawling events to the stage in the large Stuart Theater (through November 20), a black catwalk arching above the action like Mount Olympus. In three acts, the action speeds from a defeated Troy that is being sacked, to Mycenae where the victorious Agamemnon takes the temple virgin Cassandra home as plunder; and eventually, after his jealous wife Clytemnestra murders him, to further consequences that play out seven years later.

Despite the nearly three-hour length, director John Emigh and fellow adapter James Rutherford make the action speed by, since every scene is fraught with life-and-death consequences. Although Greek tragedies are written for static masked actors, to heighten the import of long monologues, the staging here is brisk. Members of the female chorus deliver individual lines with specific personality, when the chorus isn’t stressing consensus by speaking together. While just about all of the dialogue is taken from nine Greek tragedies, the translations by Kenneth Cavander have poetic cadence but no whiff of dusty classicism.

"Who is to blame? Who is to blame?" are the opening words here, which echo past the final curtain. We are at the emotional high point of the Trojan War, when the 10-year siege has just been won by clever Greek trickery. Freshly slain King Priam’s queen, Hecuba (Gloria Huwiler), is lamenting with her daughters and other women of the court, all of whom are being distributed as slaves to the victors.

There is plenty of blame to go around — and refusal to accept — in this sea of brewing hatred. Even Helen (Annabel Topham), who caused the war by running away with Paris, wards off responsibility by accusing Hecuba of having let Paris live despite prophetic warning. But blame has consequence. The vanquished must be punished or the valiant dead of the victors will be dishonored, the gods insulted if sacrifices are stinted. The King of Argos, Agamemnon (Christian Luening), went so far as to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia (Jessie Hopkins) to assure safe passage for his fleet at the war’s outset.

The last acts go into the aftermath. Back home in the palace of Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra (Katie Meister) bides her time when she sees that he has brought back the beautiful princess Cassandra (Theodora Greece) as a trophy. (A clever touch in the original 10-play cycle developed in 1979 by director John Barton for the Royal Shakespeare Company is that since Apollo condemned Cassandra’s prophecies to sound like babel, they are literally Greek to us. Trumping that, in this production the prophetess not only actually is Greek, but also is a princess, by traditional title: Her Royal Highness Theodora of Greece and Denmark. Good old Brown.)

By the end, the exiled Orestes (Chris Bremmer) has killed Clytemnestra, his mother, for butchering his father. His sister Electra (Aja Nisenson) has been clamoring for that, but both are filled with remorse after this reprisal — instantly, the one bump in this flowing abridgement. (Nisenson stands out among the other talents in the cast, giving the bedraggled Electra broad enough personality to convey both humor and anguish quite effectively.)

To paraphrase Hamlet, "What’s Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba that you should weep for her?" Well, think of it as weeping for all of us. Greek tragedies as a whole, and certainly this precisely focused summary of them, demonstrate and lament the universal human cycle of violence/ revenge/violence. In the Mideast after the latest bombing, whether on the ground or from the air, or after tragedy closer to home, such cycles may appear as inevitable as they have been perpetual.

More than one character here perceives and regrets that hatred is consuming them even as its momentum drives them fiercely on. Art, of whatever form, doesn’t have to be explicitly antiwar to break the cycle. All it has to do is what this intelligently conceived and accomplished production does: stop us in our tracks like a slap, giving us a moment to look around and come to our senses.