Actor in Oedipus, Stanford Summer Theater

Nitery Theater, Old Union, July – August 2011

Excerpt from Stanford Summer Theater (link)

In 2011, Stanford Summer Theater (in collaboration Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program and Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts) presents our 13th season, the “Memory Play Festival.”

We feature Seneca’s *Oedipus* in Ted Hughes powerful translation, directed by Matt Moore, with Matthew DiBiasio, Courtney Walsh, Tom Freeland, and Beth Deitchman. *Oedipus* plays Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 pm, Sundays at 2 pm, July 28 – August 14, in the Nitery Theater, Old Union.

Excerpt from review at Didaskalia (link)

Review by David J. Jacobson, University of California, Berkeley

The metatheatricality of the repeated “show us” was nicely underscored by the chorus’s whispered echo of the final utterance. Indeed, we were shown. The scrim’s second use came at the close of Act Three. As the chorus danced and chanted their ode downstage and Oedipus crouched against his throne upstage, with his back to the audience for the first time, one of the chorus members (Sukanya Chakrabarti, who also played Phorbas) performed an elegant Indian hand dance. The blocking here focused attention simultaneously on the ruler whose control was slipping away and on the motif of hands (used visually throughout this production—Oedipus was seen often methodically rubbing his arms from his biceps down to his fingertips, as if they were itching to do something), foreshadowing the moment when his fingers will finally tear his eyeballs from their sockets…”

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