A Journey through Art to Soul

At the Theatre of Epidaurus

“Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.”

Sophocles

Recently, I was fortunate enough to go to Greece on a pilgrimage, led by Phil Cousineau. Phil gave us a list of books, plays, films, and other resources to get us in the mood, build up some knowledge, and stir excitement, and yet reverence, about the journey we were about to take.

One work Roger and I decided to listen to on Audible was Tyrone Guthrie’s recording of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. During graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the theatre department produced an amazing version of The Oresteia, that trilogy of tragedies concerning the curse on the House of Atreus. The chorus wore bald caps and gold metallic makeup, carried huge staves, and spoke lines that sounded almost like music. The production mesmerized me.

So in 1977, I decided to co-direct and design Oedipus Rex at Samford University Theatre. When I decided to create this Greek tragedy, I was only 27 and might have thought twice about tackling such an iconic piece. But, as a (at that time yet undiscovered) ego type Four on the Enneagram with a Self-Preservation subtype, I had no fear taking on Sophocles in my youth. I often, then and now, boldly put myself into situations that are tough — just to challenge myself.

A professional actor and friend, Tom Key, played the role of Oedipus, but the rest of the cast were freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors in college. Jocaste, Creon, Tiresias, Priest, Shepherd, Messenger, and the Chorus: all undergraduate students. In the Parados (the first ode chanted when they enter the stage), the Chorus cried,

“What is God singing in his profound

Delphi of gold and shadow?

What oracle for Thebes, the Sunwhipped city?

Fear unjoints me, the roots of my heart tremble.

Now I remember, O Healer, your power, and wonder:

Will you send doom like a sudden cloud, or weave it

Like nightfall of the past?”

One reason I so loved to plunge my students into the deep involvement of bringing a Greek tragedy to life onstage is that it stretched them (and me!). Especially at a traditionally Baptist college, the experience pulled them into a world they had never dreamt of, as had happened to me when we produced Lysistrata when I was a student at the University of Montevallo. Through the years at Samford, we also put on the stage Antigone, The Birds, and The Trojan Women. As I said in my book Theatre Is My Life! about students delivering such passages, they devoured the text and spit out lines about, in this case, a man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. They delivered words like these of Oedipus Rex,

“The plague burns on, it is pitiless,

Though pallid children laden with death

Lie unwept in stony ways..”

And as they confronted such perplexities of life, these students grappled with — at a young age — the challenge of making sense of it all: the meaning of who we are, and the reason for our being on earth. Such experiences are why theatre is such a spiritual space where we can cross over a line into the Holy, and a realization that we, through art, can grapple with the incredible questions of Life and Reality. In reference to the opening quote by Sophocles, still in their youth, my students had not lost the past, nor were they dead to the future.

Lines of all the Greek plays with which I have been intimately involved materialize in my mind day after day. The productions linger in my gray matter, and I can hear the thump of wooden crooks pounding the stage floor, the whirr of the sewing machine stitching chitons, the echo of lines rehearsed in the Green Room across the hall, the rising and falling tones of the chorus odes.

So as Roger and I listened to Oedipus in preparation for our pilgrimage, all these thoughts about our Greek tragedies rushed back into my head. Why are these play that came into existence in Athens about 500 B.C. still so relevant and impactful today? Playwrights like Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus set the action of their plays in the far, exotic past, bringing to life well-known myths about kings and queens, heroes and patricians. Through beautifully crafted poetry, they portrayed agonizing circumstances sure to end in a disaster overseen by the Olympian gods.

But even though the characters are of high rank, as tragedies unfold, we watchers see ourselves in similar circumstances. We perceive the truth of human suffering as a character like Oedipus or Antigone gives voice to a pain we find hard to express. And Greek tragedy implacably reveals the emptiness of our human insistence on the control of our destiny.

Having had such intimate connections to Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, I yearned to see, touch, hear, and smell the ancient Greek theatres, especially the site of Dionysus in Athens, where most of the greatest works of Greek drama debuted. And when I stood in that theatre, I could hear the stones speaking to me, calling to me, enwrapping me, telling me: “You are home!”

Phil told us about a Jungian concept, “Participation Mystique,” in which we attain a kind of psychological and spiritual connection with certain objects, becoming one with them, being filled with awe by them, until we find it hard to distinguish ourselves from that object. And I truly experienced that mystical union there, and in the Delphi Theatre, and at the one in Epidaurus.

But it wasn’t just the theatres that led to “a-ha” moments or feelings of wonder and reverence. Just being under that blue Greek sky, seeing glimpses of the azure sea, the land, the trees, the flowers — all kept me on the verge of tears. Even now, my chest is bubbly and my eyes water at the remembrance. How could the great tragedies and Homer’s Odyssey NOT be written in this place? Pieces of the puzzle of my life began falling into place in Greece. Mysteries are not solved, but fall even deeper into what? My psyche? My imagination? My soul?

“Bewildered as a blown bird, my soul hovers and can not find

Foothold in this debate…

Divine Zeus and Apollo hold

Perfect intelligence alone of all tales ever told.”