Playwright Charles L. Mee’s surreal comedy Big Love has a unique blend of form, style and content.
In this forceful play, Mee delivers a vision of human beings as capable of both compassion and cruelty, and with an innate need for love. The Wilma’s production, directed by Jiri Zizka, is a theatrical aphrodisiac that turns out to be emotionally invigorating.
The play is based on the ancient Greek tragedy The Suppliant Women (490 B.C.), by Aeschylus, yet it is set in contemporary times.
Fifty Greek sisters are promised in marriage to their 50 cousins. Only problem is, these women are free thinkers and they rebel — all the way to an Italian villa owned by Piero, who offers them refuge but not protection against the grooms, who find them and force them to marry.
The women make a pact to kill their husbands following their wedding-night sex orgy. All but one proceed as planned and for her change of heart, her sisters put her on trial for breaking the sacred familial pact.
For a guy who says, "I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable," Mee has written a challenging play. Based on the myth of the Danaids — 50 daughters of a king, 49 of whom were sentenced to fill bottomless barrels of water — Big Love was constructed with Mee’s usual technique of taking a classical plot and infusing it with a collage of contemporary texts, drawn from low- and high-brow sources. In this case, he used bits of Scum Manifesto, Dr. Leo Buscaglia (Loving Each Other) and a toy piano rendition of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. This approach has resulted in a jarring, jagged script that seems to channel the contradictory, helter-skelter thoughts of our culture.
Aeschylus’ 50 brides, fleeing Greece and their 50 assigned grooms, are reduced to three representatives who land at an Italian villa inhabited by Piero; his mama, Bella, in her basic Italian-old-lady black; and gay nephew, Giuliano, who jumps at the chance to model a wedding dress. The next trio to arrive is the grooms in determined pursuit of the ones who got away. They were pledged, they were promised, and that’s it.
Only, it isn’t. Although beautiful, passionate Lydia (Danielle Langlois) is the essence of sensuality, opening the show by stripping off her gown and plunging nude into an onstage bathtub, it’s Thyona (Danielle Skraastad) who runs the show, bullying Olympia (Amy Gorbey) and the others into standing up for their freedom.
Many of Mee’s favorite speeches are assigned to Bella (Carmen Roman), whose Italian mama persona alternates with oracle, goddess and ruler of the roost. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, tenderly crooned by Giuliano (Ben Dibble), could be the theme song of the love/hate conflicts of the young brides.
The infuriating frustration of those conflicts is expressed first by the brides, then the grooms as they throw themselves against the floor repeatedly in movements that are half-somersault, half-blow. In a climactic bloody ballet, the women fight back. Except for one. Lydia, who falls in love with her husband, Nikos, must stand trial for betraying her sisters.
The judge, Bella, finds a balance between equality and love, but the playwright has the last word and it’s a question the audience is asking all along. Even as the sole surviving bride and groom join hands and leave the stage, their troubled smiles demonstrate that their play is only beginning.
The climactic scene of sex and violence is an astonishing swirl of lurid activity, choreographed by Zizka. For spectacle and theatrical impressiveness, Big Love is hard to beat. As a satisfying story that says something meaningful about love, it is very demanding on the viewer, and not as complete.
Jerry Rojo’s intriguing, surreal set of stone ruins includes a giant breast, a large phallic column attached to protruding lips, and a flowering egg held in a giant hand.
The dialogue of Big Love is so brisk and clever, the athleticism of the cast so entertaining, that the hard political commentaries can almost slide by. But they are there and worth reflecting on. One senses that this is how Mee handled the challenge that polio dealt him — with humor, wit, a keen eye, incredible energy and distrust of platitudes.
�
Big Love
The Wilma Theater
Broad and Spruce streets
Through April 26
Tickets: $9-$41
215-546-7824
www.wilmatheater.org
