Facing the Monster

This fall marks the coming of Yale Repertory Theatre Resident Director Liz Diamond to the American Repertory Theater. Diamond will direct the first play of the Loeb Stage season, Phaedra, in a new translation by Paul Schmidt. Diamond is well known for her collaborations with Suzan-Lori Parks, most notably on The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and The America Play. She joined the faculty of the Yale School of Drama in 1993 as a professor of directing. Diamond’s body of work is eclectic. Recent productions include Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards and Molière’s School for Wives (both in new translations by Paul Schmidt), Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy. A common element in many of the plays she has directed is that they address complex human issues through the agency of complicated female characters. Although Diamond admits this coincidence came about as a “happy accident” within the body of her work, she is ready to take up the challenge once again with Phaedra.

Jennifer Kiger: Why Phaedra?

Liz Diamond: When Bob Brustein approached me about idea of doing Phaedra, I re-read the play. As I did, I felt the oxygen draining out of the room. Phaedra’s choking on her frustrated passion terrified me. Theseus’ murderous rage appalled me. Our tragic inability to master our most destructive emotions is portrayed here with clinical clarity. The possibility that we will not, when seized in its grip, be able to release ourselves from a violent passion is deeply frightening. But of course, what frightens me is also precisely what draws me to the play.

JK: How would you define Racine’s tragic vision?

LD: In Phaedra, Racine’s conviction is that our reason is ultimately impotent in the face of our most monstrous passions. Monster is the image that recurs in the play. Phaedra, half-sister to the Minotaur, is besieged by a monstrous desire, a lust for her own stepson. At every step, Phaedra knows that not to suppress this desire will be fatal, but she cannot, because in suppressing it she is devoured from the inside. She speaks, unleashing in her husband Theseus a passion so monstrous that it devours his only son and heir.

What makes this play so modern is that there is a hideous non-inevitability to the ultimate tragedy. The gods cannot be blamed. Responsibility for the tragedy rests in the hands of human beings. Their fallibility is their own. In the play, Phaedra is given every opportunity to call back her lies; Theseus his curses. They squander every one.

JK: How does language function in the tragedy?

LD: Spoken words are responsible for the tragedy. Confessions, lies, and curses unleash the havoc. The Alexandrine line in Racine, its formal, even rigid cadence, contains the tumultuous tortured logic of Phaedra’s thinking like a vice. The more she speaks of how fatal it will be to speak, the more impossible it becomes for the vice to contain her speech. Her poetry, bursting with lush and violent imagery, finally gives way to action–the grabbing of Hippolytus’s sword. This gesture becomes enormous, catastrophic.

Paul Schmidt’s translation in blank verse has a similarly vital pulse and tension. He renders that speech clear in a modern, American English, free of self-conscious anachronisms or colloquialisms. He creates a rare thing, a translation that illuminates both Racine’s world and our own.

JK: You’ve been described as having a formalist approach to staging.

LD: The plays I’ve loved working on share one common element: language that is dense, layered, and complicated, however simple the surface may appear. The metaphors unfold like onion skin; the wordplay and image-play seem to go forever. The plays of Suzan Lori-Parks, Molière, Brecht, Beckett, Sophocles, and Heaney all have this in common. I want a play on stage to operate like a poem–to have a sense of form carrying meaning, image giving way to image. But I am certainly not just interested in form from an aesthetic point of view. For me, the principal challenge and pleasure of directing, and sometimes the agony, is to try and make every plastic element in the production–clothes, gesture, movement, space, light, and sound–embody the emotions contained in the text. It’s fantastic when you sit watching and listening in the theater and suddenly you witness the alchemical transubstantiation spoken of by Artaud, where the invisible is made visible, where the abstract is made concrete, and you feel you have understood something viscerally for the first time.

JK: How did you approach bringing the poetry of Phaedra to life through design?

LD: What I kept returning to in the play is the image of the labyrinth, of the prison. I wanted to create a maddeningly logical, rational interior where Phaedra will be trapped. The interior needs to be monolithic, endless, relentless, airless. There is no place in the social world of the court for what Phaedra desires, which is an anarchic, passionate, taboo-blasting sexuality. So, with Riccardo Hernandez, the set designer (with whom I’ve enjoyed some of my happiest collaborations, precisely in terms of visual poetry), I spoke of wanting Phaedra’s fleshy, earthly sensuality and violent passion to crash against the walls, so to speak.

Architectural form always betrays the dominant forms of culture, and in looking at the neoclassical architecture of Racine’s own period, we were struck by the rationality of spaces. It opened up another way of responding to the play. It became possible to see Phaedra not only as I have described above, as a kind of warning against succumbing to the “humors,” but at the same time as a critique of the kind of social order that demands a total suppression of such anarchic sensation. We went on to look at images of tombs and prisons. Riccardo brought in ground plans of elevations of the great Egyptian tombs and of Third Reich architecture–that apotheosis of rational planning–and gradually the design emerged. Catherine Zuber’s stunning costumes vividly contrast that reality.

JK: What are your fears going into rehearsal?

LD: Fears? They’re always the same. Death by theater for us and the audience. Blind alleys. Lame ideas. Other than those, none. [Laughter.] Or, maybe also, veering into camp. Great tragedies always flirt with camp. I can imagine Phaedra as a really fabulous, lurid psychological horror movie. But camp is metatheatrical, and Phaedra is not. It is vast, elemental, reverberant. I can’t wait.

Jennifer Kiger is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training.