Phaedra(s)
Opening Night: September 13, 2016
Closing: September 18, 2016
Theater: BAM Harvey Theater
Confess or repress: those are the options available when you lust after your stepson. The volcanic Isabelle Huppert, as the mythic queen Phaedra, tries both on for size in this carnal triptych combining multiple versions of the salacious Greek legend. Drawing from playwright Sarah Kane’s graphic study Phaedra’s Love and texts by J.M. Coetzee and Wajdi Mouawad for the script, Phaedra(s) imagines its heroine as a brutalized victim—alternately bloodied, blond-wigged, and professorial—cast into a stark world of exotic dancers and glass-walled rooms. Krzysztof Warlikowski directs this postmodern plunge into forbidden love, where sexuality wears sunglasses en route to illicit ends.
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September 15, 2016
Worst theater director’s idea ever? Maybe bringing onstage a large, high-resolution flat-screen television, on which is projected, multiple times, the shower scene from “Psycho.” I am by no means a worshiper at the altar of Alfred Hitchcock. Nonetheless, when that television screen slid onstage in “Phaedra(s),” a stultifying gloss on the story of the legendary Greek queen with an unfortunate love life, which can be endured — oh, sorry, seen — at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Sunday, I became instantly transfixed. Here, at least, was vivid proof of a cogent directorial mind at work. Never before had I absorbed in such detail the brilliance of Hitchcock’s shot-making in this most celebrated scene of violence.
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