This weekend, Ole Miss Theatre took a tragic turn with the opening of “Oedipus Rex.”
The epic Athenian tragedy features a brooding king trying to solve a mystery that not only greatly affects himself but also his constituents. As Oedipus continually attempts to eradicate the terrible happenings in Thebes, he also finds disturbing occurrences in his own life that affect him and his family.
The story is one many people know and have studied. Many know of the Oedipus complex, which is named for Oedipus’s subconscious attraction to his mother Jocasta, played by senior musical theater major Cayley Smith.
Christopher Miller, a senior musical theater major who portrays Oedipus in Sophocles’s tragedy, said the role is filled with mystery and intrigue. He said his character is faced with anger and frustration but uses his intelligence throughout his pursuit of the answer for ultimate truth.
The actors say the audience’s familiarity gives them the motivation to bring the characters to life with feeling and variety. Miller said “Oedipus Rex”is essentially true to the Greek tradition of storytelling.
“We’re storytellers. We’re each telling a part of the story,” Miller said. “I think each one of us, myself included, have just embodied our part and made it collectively the entire story.”
Director Rory Ledbetter said that one of the driving forces for the story is the eight-person chorus that enters the stage between scenes. These transitions are dark and frightening.
Ledbetter said the chorus is an integral part of portraying context and feeling to an audience between the action; the chorus’s odes and subtleties create a “push/pull” effect that really keeps the audience engaged.
Along with the intensity evoked by those onstage, the set visually brings the mind into the darkness of Thebes and the house of Oedipus. Ledbetter said the elements, especially those of the earth, come into play in the set designed by Jared Spears. The stage itself combines dark, scorched stoned pillars with a round center area filled with lighter rocks. A haze surrounds the actors, and fire makes an appearance. The lights and sound help round out the emphasis on the story being told.
Another important onstage element, Ledbetter said, is the actors’ and the chorus’s movement. He credits movement director Garrison Gibbons and assistant director Max Mattox with helping the characters come to life.
“Everybody is really alive and engaged in their bodies onstage,” Ledbetter said.
Ledbetter said he wanted to put together a show that displayed the ancient but still modernly important story, as it is – an epic. Though the story was written around 430 B.C.E., Ledbetter said the story reaches farther than history.
“It’s something more ancient than Greece, more epic than Greece, more ritualized than Greece,” Ledbetter said.
Aspects of the story reach into the subconscious.
Cayley Smith, who prepared not only to play a wife to Oedipus but also a mother figure, said she hoped the audience could get into the performance.
“I think it’s a really powerful story,” Smith said. “It goes to really dark places. I hope people can see that and enjoy it.”
