Oedipus is a mack daddy in a pimped-out Caddy. His sons bust rhymes like a couple of Greek Jay-Z's. In La Jolla Playhouse's “The Seven,” there are ancient kings and there is modern bling, and where Aeschylus' prose ends is where hip-hop begins.
SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune
Brothers turned mortal foes, Eteocles (Benton Greene, left) and Polynices (Jamyl Dobson) duke it out in a scene rehearsal for "The Seven." The show, which has its West Coast premiere tonight at La Jolla Playhouse, is a bold mash-up of hip-hop and Greek tragedy.
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For those who know Greek tragedy mostly in musty academic terms, the rap on the form is that it's strictly old-school. (Like, 2,500 years old.)
But when the playwright and hip-hop artist Will Power looked at “Seven Against Thebes,” the classic tale by Aeschylus, he saw something else: A story that echoed street themes of violence and brotherhood, abandoned families and legacies of pain handed down from father to son.
He also saw hip-hop – with its storytelling qualities, its way of creating outsized heroes and its capacity for sampling and remixing disparate elements – as an ideal way to recast the tragedy.
“Some people would disagree,” says Power as he munches on Chinese takeout during a rehearsal break at the Playhouse, his face framed by a thick beard and a plaid engineer's cap.
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"The Seven"
When: Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 7 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.; through March 16
Where: La Jolla Playhouse, UCSD
Tickets: $28-$60
Phone: (858) 550-1010
Online: lajollaplayhouse.org
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“They'd be like, 'Hip-hop has nothin' to do with it!' But there are so many oral traditions. You think about (storytelling) ritual; you think about chanting.
“We don't have sound recordings of what it was back then, but we have the text, and we have the descriptions. Based on the descriptions, I was saying, well, what is the modern parallel to this?
“And for me, growing up where I grew up, it'd be hip-hop. It'd be lyrics; it'd be rhyme. It'd be a highly stylized form.”
For Power, who came up on the streets of San Francisco, the Playhouse production of “The Seven” (which opens tonight) is a chance to further hone this hybrid creation, this melding of eras and genres that invokes Aeschylus's classic text but also name-drops everything from “The Simpsons” to “Shaft.”
The show originally was staged off-Broadway in 2006 by the New York Theatre Workshop, to strong reviews and an Obie Award for Edwin Lee Gibson, who reprises his role as Oedipus here.
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Hip-hopping to Broadway
Though hip-hop has not exactly stormed Broadway, its impact on theater has grown over the past few years. Here's a sample of ways the beat has taken to the stage:
“Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk”: Though Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe's mid-1990s Broadway hit was actually about tap, the show brought in hip-hop elements, and bore the subtitle: “A Tap/Rap Discourse on the Staying Power of the Beat.”
Hip-Hop Theater Festival: Danny Hoch founded this annual fest in New York eight years ago. Hoch also directed Will Power's solo show “Flow”; Jo Bonney, director of “The Seven,” developed and directed Hoch's solo work “Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop.”
Eveoke Dance Theatre: The theatrically savvy San Diego dance company has a strong rep for celebrating hip-hop, both in its own works and in collaborations with local theaters.
“The Wiz”: The original 1975 musical helped bring R&B and soul to Broadway. (“The Wiz” also was the first play that “The Seven” director Will Power ever saw.) Des McAnuff's modernized revival at La Jolla Playhouse in 2006 was deeply rooted in hip-hop.
Sean Combs: The zillion-selling rapper and producer (aka Diddy) surprised everyone in 2004 by starring in the Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” (and acquitting himself pretty well).
– JAMES HEBERT
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But Power and his director, Jo Bonney (last at the Playhouse with “Adoration of the Old Woman”), shared a nagging feeling that the piece wasn't quite complete. So when Des McAnuff, the theater's recently departed artistic director, saw “The Seven” in New York and asked about bringing it to La Jolla, the creative team viewed it as a chance to finish what they'd started.
“We always felt frustrated,” says Bonney. “We felt we had this wonderful production, this wonderful story. But we had run out of time to detail it.
“And that detailing seemed to be in the doing again. That's what was so wonderful about La Jolla saying, 'We'd like to bring it in and give you a full rehearsal period again.' ”
In the time between, Power polished the script, looking to tighten the storyline without turning the piece into a slavish remaking.
“I didn't want to do necessarily a straight 'modern' adaptation, like 'West Side Story' was for 'Romeo and Juliet,' ” as Power says. “It's basically a fusion between the imagination of what it was, and whatever facts we have.”
What results, in Bonney's words, is “an extremely, extremely loose interpretation” of Aeschylus' saga, written in the fifth century B.C.
In the original, Oedipus never actually appears. Nor do the seven warriors of the title, whom Aeschylus describes mostly through the character of a messenger.
But the basic narrative remains. Oedipus, the tormented ex-king of Thebes, has arranged for his sons Eteocles and Polynices to share the kingdom's leadership, alternating from year to year. But when the first year is up, Eteocles won't cede the throne.
Polynices then gathers seven armies to conquer Thebes and uproot his brother.
In Power's take on the story, an onstage DJ is a central presence, serving as a kind of turntable-scratching tour guide through the show's wildly blended universes, with the characters' ritualized movements choreographed by modern-dance icon Bill T. Jones.
“From the beginning, that's what the DJ says: 'There are no two worlds I cannot mix,' ” Power points out. “She's a storyteller, and her form is the turntable. She's not only mixing records, she's mixing worlds, she's mixing mythologies.
“That's a symbol throughout the whole play. Things get rewound, there are flashbacks, things get fast-forwarded. These are things you do in theater – but we try to make it look as though it's directed by the DJ.”
Daddy O
He be the Greek wit' soul / So sweet, yet he oh so cold
In the script, the play's father figure swaggers into “The Seven” with the stage direction, “Enter OEDIPUS, dressed like a pimp from the 1970s.”
Though he's barely a spectral presence in Aeschylus, Oedipus is very much flesh and blood in this adaptation, and the pain he causes his own flesh and blood is at the show's emotional core.
In the ancient stories, Oedipus is a cursed figure who blinds himself after realizing he has killed his father and conceived children with his own mother.
Here, having resigned himself to the curse, he seems almost to revel in it, even goading Eteocles and Polynices into battling each other.
When Bonney first sat down with Power to map out the piece, her main question was what the idea of that curse meant to the writer.
She recalls Power's response: “In my community, I feel maybe the curse might be seen as the baggage of father to son. Of families without fathers, the breaking up of the family unit.
“There seems to be this terrible curse that follows through of children growing up often without a father, or maybe the father was in and out of their lives.”
It doesn't come across as a heavy-handed message in the play, Bonney says.
“It's a very light touch,” she says. “But it is something he was interested in, and that I find interesting as an interpretive angle on the whole thing.”
For Gibson, the character of Oedipus taps into a rich vein of themes about enduring curses of all kinds – bigotry and self-defeatism among them.
“You may see Oedipus as just heaping stuff on people, on his sons,” the actor says. “But in this incarnation you really get to see how we must take responsiblity for ourselves, even given all the things that are stacked against us as a people.”
For minorities in this country, he says, the question is, “What do we do about it? Do we keep moving on – not around (discrimination) but pushing that barrier back? Or do we turn around and just start to feed on ourselves and each other? I think that's a great thing we get to see.”
In that light, Gibson relishes the complexity of Oedipus, how the character is so self-aware and yet so seemingly helpless.
“What I love about it is this cat really gets to face himself,” Gibson says. “It's not like he's just a villain. He's a bit contrite in some ways. And he understands what he's done. The journey, his willful journey toward hell – that's a lot of fun.”
State of the nation
Beyond the parallels to issues of race, there are other ways that “The Seven” matches up well with the state of the nation in 2008, says Christopher Ashley, the Playhouse's artistic director.
Though the production was scheduled long before he came aboard in October, Ashley is intimately familiar with the work and its origins. He was once literary manager at New York Theatre Workshop, where he has directed a half-dozen shows, and he saw “The Seven” there in early previews.
So there was little question that the show would remain on the Playhouse slate, as essentially the last production of the McAnuff era. (Ashley's first programmed season begins in April with Moisés Kaufman's “33 Variations.”)
“It feels as if it's rhyming with what's happening in the culture right now, in so many different ways,” Ashley says. “You turn on CNN and watch the election, and you watch the Obama/Hillary (matchup) – race lines, gender lines, dynastic questions. Those politics are all in play right now in the culture.
“And because it's based on an Aeschylus story, it's just a really good yarn.”
This is not Power's first go-round at the Playhouse. Last year, he presented “Honey Bo and the Gold Mine,” a children's musical the Playhouse commissioned for its Performance Outreach Program, which tours shows to local schools and community centers. (That show also had a hip-hop backbeat.)
Before “The Seven” – for which he not only wrote the book and lyrics but co-wrote the score (with Will Hammond and Justin Ellington) – Power was known for being a performer as well as a musician. He gained most notice for his solo works “Flow” and “The Gathering.”
When it came to “The Seven,” Power says he had a bigger mission in mind than helping keep Greek tragedy from being ghettoized (as it were).
“I think (the show has) done that to a certain extent, which is exciting,” he says. “But for me the larger question is trying to do that for theater in general. And that's something I'm still working on. I haven't cracked that nut yet – how to get young people in.
“So for me, it's not so much about the Greek mythology as it is about theater. (I'm trying to say), 'This is a place for you. You can come here and hear stories that reflect you, that are relevant to you.' You know what I mean?”
Powers utters that last phrase – one he appends to seemingly every other sentence – with a trademark twang that seems drawn straight from the Southern “crunk” style of rap.
It's a little reminder of how hip-hop, a cultural “sponge” (as Bonney calls it), can wed country with street, the urban with the pastoral, the cool with the schooled.
Maybe hip-hop still doesn't have quite the power to convince two warring Greek boys to make nice. But if it can make an ancient play seem new again, even Aeschylus might be pleased to give this show a spin.
