The Love of the Nightingale

TOGA PARTY Proud taps his inner Greek.

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s retelling of the Greek myth of Philomele is a tonal patchwork quilt. There are squares of ritualistic convention: Athenian sisters Philomele and Procne dream of their sunny futures, when Procne is married off to King Tereus. That’s abutted against scraps of the horrific: Tereus lusts after then rapes his sister-in-law Philomele; when she refuses to be quiet about it, he cuts out her tongue. Woven into that is modern-day feminism: Philomele first considers she’s to blame, then insists, no, it’s Tereus’ doing. There’s also a Shakespearean design of long-lost relatives reunited: Mute Philomele uses puppets to expose Tereus’ violent acts so that Procne finally recognizes her. Stitched to all this are patches of the wry and the whimsical, as with the quietly contemplative, magical ending when Philomele turns into a nightingale.

It takes an equally chameleonic set of actors to execute this ambitious work’s differing, sometimes opposing styles, at once meta and mundane. But LiveWire’s actors tend toward one color: green; they’re not equipped to handle Nightingale’s variety and gravity. This Tereus is too bland to be so brutal, while these sisters are too superficially screechy to make compelling their transformation from innocents to victims to enraged, vengeance-hungry women. Philomele’s pivotal puppet show ought to whop us with its dramatic force, yet this hastily staged scene hardly glances. While the bloody second act does gather its own momentum, the production sorely misses a director who gets the play’s patterns and knows how to sew them all together.—Novid Parsi