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Seneca's "Oedipus": A Modern Acting VersionIn 1999 Michael Elliot Rutenberg of the Department of Theatre at Hunter College of the City University of New York produced a version of Seneca's Oedipus aimed fairly and squarely at performance. Did it work? Could it work? The answer is a very definite "Yes". His version, published by Bolchazy-Carducci Inc of Illinois is eminently actable, but he has had to change it considerably to make it so. He admits this right from the start, for the full title is Oedipus of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Freely Translated and Adapted by MER. It is a verse version, but it is modern verse: he has not attempted to reproduce the original but to echo it. He has replaced the choral odes with freely adapted extracts from Seneca's other writings, the Dialogues and Moral Letters, which he has rendered into an appropriate verse form. These extracts have been carefully chosen to reflect and comment upon the action with a directness which the modern audience would not see in the original odes, which were filled to overflowing with allusions which the modern audience would find meaningless. In addition, he has replaced the full chorus with one man, and emphasises his common humanity with the audience by having him sit amongst them in the scenes, emerging from them, putting on his mask and commenting, then removing the mask and returning to his seat. The declamatory nature of the language has vanished, replaced with a more modern, albeit still quite formal, style and what allusions are retained are those which will be familiar to the modern audience or are just so essential that their removal would change the meaning compleetly. The characters are believable: there is a pig-headedness and an almost whining quality about Oedipus which is definitely not Sophoclean. The other characters, including Jocasta, see much more clearly than Oedipus, and continually warn him off pursuing the matter any further, but his determination to continue in grounded in a blind arrogance which is much more human than the hubris of Sophocles' hero. It is not so much fate that dooms Oedipus here, but his own character, and in many ways this brings us closer to melodrama. This melodramatic sense is intensified by the apocalyptic atmosphere which pervades the play. Seneca makes much more of the suffering brought about by the plague than Sophocles: death, horror and destruction are ominipresent throughout. Rutenberg's achievement is that he has brought this play to life without the sense of wallowing in death and destruction that makes, for instance, Titus Andronicus so hard to take nowadays. Its view of life is a bleak one, but the bleakness is lifted at the end by the chorus' last words:
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