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Besides working with national and international directors as dramaturg, I have been extremely fortunate throughout my career to direct shows of high quality—plays with great theatrical potential, literary values, and historical importance that still speak to a modern audience. I began directing in High School, where I founded my own theatre group. In graduate school I had excellent directing teachers who encouraged me to pursue directing—and gave me opportunities to direct authors such as Strindberg and Chekhov who might only come along later in a professional directing career. At my previous job in Atlanta and here in Knoxville, the respective artistic directors entrusted me with great comic writers such as Goldoni, who combined improvisational comedy with precise writing, French writers such as Marivaux and Moliére, and with the American premiere of German avant-garde writer Friederike Roth’s Piano Plays. Racine’s Phaedra is one of those plays which most directors want to direct some time in their careers because it features deeply felt characters, great plot construction, and negotiations between religious, philosophical and political issues—in other words, the essence of all great theatre.
In Racine’s play, Phaedra is the queen of Athens who desires her stepson Hippolytus. When her husband, who has long been absent from the court, is declared dead, she reveals her desire to him. The tragedy unfolds when the king suddenly returns. To cover up the sexual and political transgression and to preempt public accusations about an incestuous affair, Phaedra accuses her stepson of making sexual advances to her. Hippolytus is banned from court and dies a gruesome death while Phaedra, ruing her deed, commits suicide.
While Racine drew on Greek mythology and Louis XIV’s court society in the seventeenth century to create his characters, our Phaedra is a modern woman in a high-powered contemporary setting. She tries to pursue her desires in a media society where both sexuality and politics are experienced under the scrutiny of television, computers, and video surveillance. Racine constructs Phaedra’s desires and traces her self-destruction within a closely monitored court society set in a world without God’s grace. Her fate is magnified in the modern setting, where Phaedra’s downfall and the political choices of her husband play out as public spectacle in a world where characters must make personal and political decisions under the pressure of the national media and digitized social networks.
I wanted to release Phaedra from its seventeenth century context without interfering with Racine’s powerful plot construction. Convinced that Racine’s elegance and simplicity would work well in a contemporary setting, I charged the design team to think about how to recreate the contemporary correlate of seventeenth-century court society through a design that features sleek composition, reflective surfaces, and high fashion costumes. I wanted to assure that a play with such emotional power, one that should arguably be performed in a larger theatre, could convey the presence of a high-powered society and intensely public culture, in the lab theare, which is by nature rather bare and intimate.
The University of Tennessee | College of Arts & Sciences | UTK Theatre Department | Knoxville, Tennessee 37996 | 865-974-5161
