Jonh Jesurun’s Philoktetes @ Soho Rep

The first image of the play is a double projection of crashing waves. One projection takes up most of the floor, while the other angles up from the back to the ceiling. The landscape is silently shifting simultaneously towards, away, and around us. The projections change throughout the play, but they are always doubled. Sometimes they are in unison, sometimes in opposition, but always dislocating you from the setting. We are never sure where we stand in regards to the action.

This is a play about displacement. And how the outcast, the deformed, the freak is never in the here and now. For the outcast, here and now is always other. Your own body, the thing that links you to other people, also becomes other. The outcast is dead but not dead.

Philoktetes, the leper without a colony, turns his back to the audience and his face appears massive and grotesque above him on the screen. He disassociates from his body. Curiously, this image is later replaced by the image of Neoptolemus, the too young and too passionate boy who wants to find out “if there is anything about love.” Odysseus’ and Philoktetes’ cruel and cerebral sparring shoves any emotional eruptions out of the picture. They create the new outsider, the one who won’t play the nasty games of men with elephant-sized egos. Maybe this is why Neoptolemus and Philoktetes fall in love towards the end of the play.

The language in this play forces you outside of time and place. It turns you into the outcast trapped on the outskirts of some crumbling city constantly tumbling towards the brink of anarchy. The world of the play is always in motion, morphing like Philoktetes strange festering bacteria so as to encompass dissonant things like the Trojan War, Moo Shu Pork and talking suicidal birds.

Odysseus insists, with a fervency only to be found in an historical figure of antiquity, that there must have been some mis-step that brought about Philoktetes’ injury. He must have brought it upon himself by offending or neglecting some god or some custom. However, this world is strange, cruel and always doubling, then triangulating itself. This play doesn’t mold itself to the conventions of Odysseus classically Aristotelian sense of tragic fate. No. This play happens in the land of the outcast with no history, no present, and no desire except for death.

Please note: Soho Rep offers 99 cent tickets to all of its Sunday performances. More theatres should do this! http://sohorep.org/