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Mock the Casbah
by Marlon Hurt
The Persians . . . A Comedy About War With Five Songs reviewed July 14, 2005
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| Rodney Gardiner and Hanna Cheek in THE PERSIANS . . . a comedy about war with five songs, by Waterwell. |
| Photo Credit:Ryan Jensen |
| Persians are "passionate people," argues Iranian-born actor Arian Moayed, and "all that hair," he offers as an afterthought, is just "to keep us warm." Issues of hirsuteness aside, if theater company Waterwell's re-envisioning of Aeschylus's The Persians is any indication, I would add that Persians are also somewhat schizophrenic, and not a little over-caffeinated. And thank the gods for it: what better way to shake some life into what is widely considered the world's oldest surviving play?
First performed in 472 A.D., the work is remarkable not only for its age but also for the fact that it is the only extant Greek play to deal with an actual, historical event, namely the Persian king Xerxes's invasion of Greece just eight years earlier. With monumental hubris on full display, Xerxes amassed an army of nearly a million men—an incredible force even by today's standards and unimaginable 2,500 years ago—to conquer Greece for no other reason than that his father, King Darius, had failed to do so.
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| L. to R. - Tom Ridgely, Hanna Cheek, Arian Moayed (with Rodney Gardiner below) in THE PERSIANS . . . |
| Photo Credit:Ryan Jensen |
| The ensuing battle—known as the Battle of Salamis, in which Aeschylus participated—was indeed a rout, only not in the way Xerxes imagined: before day's end, the king's overconfidence had sunk hundreds of Persian ships and cost thousands upon thousands of Persian soldiers their lives. Xerxes retreated home with little more than a band of half-starved stragglers in tow. The empire his father built was broken in a day.
From a Persian perspective, this is hardly the stuff of comedy. Naturally, this does not stop Waterwell in the least. With a large rug as their backdrop (Persian, of course) and a four-piece jazz/rock band tightly packed upstage left, the energetic ensemble of Hanna Cheek, Rodney Gardiner, Arian Moayed, and Tom Ridgely embraces a whirlwind of styles and approaches: this is Aeschylus by way of a variety show. A look into the lives of those relatives left behind, for instance, is treated as an MTV-style reality show. ("Our cameras found out what happens when people stop being polite and start being Persian.")
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| L to R: Arian Moayed and Tom Ridgely in THE PERSIANS . . . |
| Photo Credit:Ryan Jensen |
| Elsewhere, the retelling of Xerxes's disastrous fortunes after he engages the Greeks in battle is played out as a highly rhythmic, comically effective boxing match between Cheek and Gardiner, with Moayed officiating and Ridgely narrating in the style of an old-timey New York sports announcer. And Gardiner's turn as the ghost of King Darius by way of James Brown is not to be missed.
This is not to say that the piece is without its pathos. Aeschylus is a writer highly convinced of the universe's innate morality; as Xerxes discovers, justice is always lurking right below the surface, implacable and unavoidable. For example, the humor in the dumb show of the boxing match grows into something particularly poignant, balanced as it is with Ridgely's horrific recounting of the few survivors' homecoming: "The rest marched on…through Thrace, a handful, home at last to Persia: motherland, widowland, stripped of all her sons."
The most notable of these moments, however, belongs to Moayed as Xerxes. Returning home to a chorus of laments blaming him for needlessly marching the country's sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers to their deaths, he builds a funeral dirge out of little more than a list of the names of those men whom he will never see again. Where Moayed could easily fling himself into gnashing emotional self-indulgence he instead evokes actual grief. It was such a strong image that I was slightly disconcerted—and more than a little disappointed—to see the lights rise again for a final, subdued coda.
As for the politics, well, they are a natural, even necessary tool if one is to discuss ethics on an international scale. Indeed, when a play's premise involves a superpower's leader invading another country because the leader's father failed to conquer that country previously, hints about our current involvement in Iraq are unavoidable. To Waterwell's immense credit, however, such allusions remain largely elliptical—there are no sermons here. What is here is a delightfully flashy bit of plate-spinning. Aeschylus never looked so good.
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The Perry Street Theater
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Category: Comedy
Written by: Waterwell Ensemble
Directed by: Tom Ridgely
Produced by: Waterwell
Opened: July 13, 2005
Closed: August 20, 2005
Running Time: 70 minutes
Theater: The Perry Street Theater
Address: 31 Perry Street
New York, NY
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Tickets: $25.00
None
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Creative Team
Written by: Waterwell, based on the play by Aeschylus
Directed by: Tom Ridgely
Produced by: Waterwell
Light Designer: Sabrina Braswell
Original Music: Lauren Cregor
Costume Designer: Elizabeth Payne
Choreographer: Kate Mehan and Lynn Peterson
Musicians: Jeremy Daigle and Joe Morse
Cast
Hanna Cheek as Atossa
Rodney Gardiner as Darius
Arian Moayed as Xerxes
Tom Ridgely as Messenger
Crew
Stage Manager: Kendall O'Neill
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