Aias

By Sophokles

Translated by Scott Scullion

Directed by Adam Smith Albion

At the Agassiz Theater

through this weekend

My friend the classics purist is upset that the Classical Club's production of Sophokles' tragedy Aias doesn't have an all-male cast, as it did during its original run. But Aias isn't the Hasty Pudding show, I answer--although the overactors in this play rival the Pudding's in the way they exaggerate their characters to the point of comic caricature.

Granted, the premise of Aias is funny in a sick sort of way. After Achilles becomes a casualty of the Trojan War, the Greeks honor the clever Odysseus (Thomas Hale), not the fierce but heroic Aias (Daniel Vilmure), with Achilles' armor. Snubbed, Aias swears revenge on the ungrateful Greeks, but in the madness of his rampage, slaughters not the Greeks but their sheep. All the gore happens offstage, except for one scene in which Aias' tent is so packed with bloody sheep car-casses that it looks like a meat locker.

Not surprisingly, Odysseus is a bit incredulous when Athena (Leta Fincher) explains it all to him. For a goddess of wisdom, Fincher's Athena seems unduly bloodthirsty, even going so far as to chide Odysseus for his timid revulsion. She's supposed to be that way, says my friend the purist, but this Athena revels in the bloodshed so much that she would horrify Lady Macbeth.

Once he regains his sanity, the twice-dishonored Aias considers suicide, despite the pleas of his wife Tekmessa (Jenny Bader) and his sailors, who form the traditional chorus. Bader is a delight as she reveals the long-hidden pleasures of screaming in anguish, but the chorus are a mixed lot. The women sailors ("Oh, no!" cries my friend the purist) tend to chew the scenery; the men are wooden. All seem incongruous, with their Japanese baseball uniform-style costumes and their song-and-dance routines. My friend the purist says that there would have been music and dancing in the original, but I wonder if they would have resembled Yannis Arzimanoglou's melodramatic piano music or Eleni Nikolopoulou's Broadway-style choreography.

Only the first half of the play deals with the fall of Aias; the second half is an Antigone-like dispute among several new characters over whether to bury a lawbreaker's corpse (shown as a mummy with a bloody sword in its chest). Favoring burial is the swashbuckling Teukros (Gintaras Valiulis); against burial are the petulant and imperious Menelaos (Elliot Thomson) and Agamemnon (Joe Song). All it seems to boil down to, though, is a contest among the three to strike the grandest pose, shout the loudest, and sneer the most.

The blood-smeared Aias has the widest emotional range of all the characters, evoking bloodlust, paranoia, self-pity, and a doomed dignity. Vilmure ably displays this range, but he too falls prey to the disease that strikes most of the players: in moments of high drama, he affects a British accent. My friend the purist suggests that such affectation is intended to simulate the changes in intonation that Greek actors would have made at appropriate moments, but my guess is that Aias thinks it is on Masterpiece Theater.

Maybe Aias means to be truly tragic, or maybe it means only to shock, but ultimately its more disgusting and exaggerated elements only cause laughter.