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n Racine’s play, Phaedra, Queen of Athens, has long struggled against her desire for her stepson Hippolytus. After many years of absence from the court, her husband Theseus is declared dead, and Phaedra is persuaded to reveal her desire to Hippolytus. The king suddenly returns, and tragedy unfolds. To conceal her sexual and political transgression and to preempt public accusations about an incestuous affair, Phaedra denounces her stepson for having made sexual advances. Hippolytus is banned from court and dies a gruesome death while Phaedra, ruing her deed, commits suicide.
This production aims to release Phaedra from its seventeenth century context without interfering with Racine’s powerful plot construction. While Racine drew on Greek mythology and on the elaborate conventions of seventeenth-century court society to create his characters, our Phaedra is a modern woman in a high-powered contemporary setting. She sets out 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 traces Phaedra’s self-destruction within the closely monitored court of the Sun King (Louis XIV). If Racine’s world was already devoid of God’s grace, in the modern setting, the theological abyss has widened. Where the political and erotic choices that lead to her downfall play out as public spectacle, Phaedra’s fate is magnified. The unrelenting, ever-open eye of the camera and the incessant buzz of the national media have turned the world into a digitized hall of mirrors. Her tragedy—and the fates of the other figures who are drawn down with her—is transformed into a mediatized spectacle.
Racine’s elegance and simplicity are echoed in a modernist staging that recreates the contemporary correlate of seventeenth-century court society through a design that features sleek composition, reflective surfaces, and high fashion costumes. Omnipresent cameras and intermittent media sounds re-contextualize this high-powered society and intensely public culture in our own time. The production aspires thereby to translate the emotional power of Racine’s play, first performed in the Parisian Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1677, into the lab theatre, and to ask about the possibility and reality of tragedy in our own time.
The University of Tennessee | College of Arts & Sciences | UTK Theatre Department | Knoxville, Tennessee 37996 | 865-974-5161
