Myth Massachusetts Essayons trivializes Greek tragedy BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	Europhochylus, Massachusetts Program A: Desire, by Josh Rollins; Europhochylus House of Pizza, by Kate Hundley; and Mowing the Parched Earth, by Art Hennessey. Program B: Megan, by Irina Salimov; Dryope in Common, by Nancy Hurlbut; and Chorus Girls, by Amanda Good Hennessey. Presented in repertory by Essayons Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through May 29.

The Greeks are getting a lot of publicity these days. You can hardly flip through a newspaper without coming across a story about the security preparations in Athens for the Olympic Games or an image of hunky movie stars sporting the hippest Hellenic battle gear. Evocations of the ancients’ imperial ambitions, vicious combat, and spiritual quandaries seem all too appropriate when you consider contemporary affairs of state, where a barbaric political war grows thornier by the day, in part because of religious clashes and the staunch loyalty stemming from cronyism.

Hearing that the six world-premiere Bay State–set one-acts in Essayons Theatre Company’s Europhochylus, Massachusetts are inspired by Greek myths and tragedies, one could expect that classic tales of valor, morality, and hubris have been reconfigured to apply to contemporary politics. But to see these plays is to witness a cute writing exercise stretched to the point of insipidness that sometimes teeters on goofiness. The notion that humans’ mistakes turn Nature topsy-turvy, a theme that pervades many myths, is reduced in Nancy Hurlbut’s Dryope in Common to a sassy nymph popping out of the Frog Pond to scold and pile guilt on a new Beacon Hill mom. And instead of anything resembling soaring lyrical poetry and ecstatic odes, we get in Amanda Good Hennessey’s Chorus Girls a Dr. Seuss-like rhyming account of a well-heeled family’s travails refracted through the personal sagas of the co-dependent members of its own personal chorus.

Taking in the festival’s two programs — each of which comprises three plays and features, for the most part, actors in repertory — is like beholding Sisyphus’s boulder plummet down the mountain. Although each piece offers some good performances, the cleverest, most-substantive script, Josh Rollins’s Desire, comes at the top of Program A. From there it’s downhill in terms of quality of writing and contemporary treatment of sweeping themes.

Rollins, who also directs Desire, is the only one of the six writers who uses the plot of a classic tragedy as a framework. He’s chosen Euripides’s Hippolytus, and he harnesses it for all it suggests about the moral anguish that lust provokes and its possible catastrophic consequences. In his rendering of the tale of Theseus’s son, Hippolytus, whom Aphrodite punishes by making him the object of stepmother Phaedra’s desire, Aphrodite (Bernice Sim) is the "world’s first extremely competent slut." She slinks around in a vinyl get-up waxing erotic about Tom Waits’s voice and unleashes the misdirected desire as part of a scheme to orchestrate the knotty familial love triangle.

The play is a psychological tangle of repression, action, and guilt, with Phaedra figure Fae (Angela Rose) showing glimmers of the fierce torment characteristic of Greek tragedies as she eggs on the sexual urges of her stepson (Adam Rosencrance). The tugs of lust are eloquently contrasted with the powers of love, which Theseus ponders when he returns home, catches his wife and son together, and banishes his son, an ultimately fatal command.

From there it’s on to Kate Hundley’s Europhochylus House of Pizza, in which an upstart Yankees exec (Sarah Peterson) is sent to trick a burned-out ball player (Floyd Richardson) who’s been freshly sacked by the Red Sox to come back to his former team, much as the title character in Sophocles’s Philoctetes is hoodwinked into returning from exile and rejoining the Greeks who’d banished him. But when Babe Ruth (Doug Hodes) materializes to supply career counseling to the proud player, he’s a far cry from Athens’s wisdom-dispensing deities.

The festival does bear a likeness to Greek drama in its epic nature: to see it in its entirety, you have to return a second night. Program B, however, resembles absurdist drama more than anything the ancients created. It starts with Megan, Irina Salimov’s sloppy sketch of female victimization — a muddle of alter egos, elective amputations, antidepressants, and imaginary orchestras. Then there’s Dryope by way of the Frog Pond. And the program closes with Good Hennessey’s verse-spoken Chorus Girls, in which a therapist of the pop-psychology school mends a Wellesley family’s dysfunction, then assists the household’s resident chorus in finding its individual voices. More of the Essayons playwrights should have taken their cue from this chorus’s words: "What I really desire is emotional health/This drama doesn’t lead to emotional wealth."