Photo credit: Ross Zentner
Skylight Music Theatre presents ‘The Gospel at Colonus,’ adapted from the ancient Greek ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ by Lee Breuer and Bob Telson, with direction by Sheri Williams Pannell.
Playwright Lee Breuer’s script for The Gospel at Colonus begins with this description of the setting: “A Pentecostal church. Behind its elegant interior is a line of ancient Greek temple columns. One holy place rises out of the ruins of another.” The church choir and seven musicians, five deacons, an evangelist, a guest gospel quintet, a pastor and his congregation take places. Everyone on stage is African American. A visiting black preacher opens a leather-bound book and begins: “I take as my text this evening the Book of Oedipus.”
“It doesn’t feel like a musical,” says Christie Chiles Twillie, music director for the Skylight Music Theatre’s production opening Friday, Jan. 17. “I think we can define it more as experimental theater. It’s something very different.”
Breuer co-founded one of New York City’s defining experimental theater ensembles, Mabou Mines, in 1970. By 1980, he was writing for the group in collaboration with composer Bob Telson. Telson was a former member of the Philip Glass Ensemble (Glass was another Mabou co-founder, though he didn’t stay long), a pianist for salsa bandleaders Tito Puente and Machito and the organist, composer and arranger for the gospel-singing Five Blind Boys of Alabama. The Blind Boys played that gospel quintet in the original 1983 production of Colonus at the Brooklyn Academy’s Next Wave Festival. The show was an international hit and even ran for several months on Broadway in 1988.
Skylight’s production is directed by Milwaukee’s Sheri Williams Pannell. “When I saw it in the ’80s on PBS’ ‘Great Performances,’” she says, “I thought, ‘What did I just experience here?’ It was like church, but that’s not a Bible story! I said, ‘Somehow, I’ve got to be part of this!’” A member of the Skylight family as performer, director and advisory committee member, she’d hinted for years that the show should be staged. “The question was always, ‘Can we find the actors?’” she says. She honors former artistic director Ray Jivoff for introducing it in his farewell season.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Yes, it’s Sophocles’ play, Oedipus at Colonus, refashioned by Breuer and Telson as a modern African American Pentecostal church service. More than half of it is sung. Oedipus’ spirit speaks through church members, chiefly the preacher and the gospel quintet. His daughter, Antigone, inspires the evangelist’s words; Theseus, king of Athens, takes hold of the pastor; the choir is the responsive congregation.
Telling an Old Story in a New Way
The original play was among the last of more than 100 composed by the ancient Greek playwright. The first performance, in 401 B. C. in the holy Theatre of Dionysus, in Athens, was staged after Sophocles’ death. As was always the case with the great Greek poets who created the playwriting art, that first audience knew the story. What mattered to them and to the elected judges of the annual, three-day tragedy contest, the climax of the spring festival honoring the dying-resurrecting nature god Dionysus, was the manner of the telling, the new understandings it provided.
Most people know Sophocles’ earlier tragedy, Oedipus the King. The hero who solved the riddle of the Sphynx, rescued Thebes from famine and became its honored king would, through no fault of his own, kill his father, marry his mother and have sons and daughters by her. When the truth was revealed, the mother-wife hung herself and the son-husband-father-brother tore his eyes out with her brooches.
What happens next is less familiar. Blind Oedipus suffers for many years, a virtual prisoner in Thebes of his brother-in-law, Creon, the city’s new king. Oedipus’ two sons come of age and cold-bloodedly vie for the throne they both see as their inheritance. Oedipus becomes a threat when the younger generation of Thebans, learning the tragic tale of their unlucky former king, now seeks his guidance regarding succession. Creon responds by banishing Oedipus. His sons are relieved to see him gone. Only his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, stand by him.
Antigone guides her blind father by the hand as they make their way to a sacred forest on the outskirts of Athens. It’s called Colonus. Oedipus believes he’s meant to die there. Will the Athenian community permit a man with such a past to enter a sanctified site? Moreover, in death, will Oedipus be saved or damned? Sophocles made those questions his subject, and Breuer stands by him.
Breuer was inspired by the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who connected Greek tragedy with the Pentecostal service in providing “a communal catharsis which forges religious, cultural and political bonds.” Williams Pannell is a devout member of Calvary Baptist Church, which, she says, “has very much that Pentecostal influence. When the powerful truth of what you’re hearing moves you, you respond.” About the Mississippi Delta Blues-style music, Twillie says, “When you have the singers we have, audience members will be out of their seats! You’ll feel that Hammond B-3 giving you a hug!”
Performances are January 17-26 in the Cabot Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets and more information, call 414-291-7800 or visit skylightmusictheatre.org.
