Monday, March 29, 2027 | 7:00 PM
Location to be announced
Directed by Nathan Winkelstein
Phedra is Queen of Athens, and wife to the legendary King Theseus. Her stepson Hippolytus has sworn himself to chastity, serving the goddess Artemis—and maddening Aphrodite, who curses Phedra to fall in love with him. Luis Quintero, playwright of the award-winning Medea: Re-Versed, pens a new rap version of the classical myth, set in a world where rhythm fuels reckoning and desire can destroy. Phedra and Hippolytus clash in a charged lyrical duel, drawn together by a forbidden desire as dangerous as it is inevitable. As they fight to resist repeating Theseus’ legacy, the line between passion and harm blurs, turning every verse to one question: Where does love end, and violence begin?
Produced in partnership with the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and the Alley Theatre
This Reading was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts.
THE CAST
ABOUT HIPPOLYTUS
Phaedra of Euripides’ Hippolytus, the earliest stream of source material for this production, sees a cursed pattern in her experience of sexual desire for her stepson, the play’s titular character. Early in the play, Phaedra calls out to her mother, Pasiphae, and sister, Ariadne, before categorizing herself as the third woman in her family destroyed by wretched desire after them. Things only go downhill from here. When Phaedra’s dedicated nurse uncovers that the heroine desires her stepson and intends to take her own life for it, she takes it upon herself to remedy the situation by telling Hippolytus (after swearing him to secrecy). Hippolytus reacts with a misogynistic rant, which strengthens Phaedra’s resolve to take her own life after writing a tablet falsely accusing Hippolytus of raping her. Theseus (Hippolytus’ father and Phaedra’s husband) curses his son upon reading the writing tablet tied to his dead wife’s hand, leading to his son’s death. Euripides was no stranger to exploring women tortured by such destructive desires—witness, for example, Medea—but this Phaedra is distinct for her simultaneous awareness of and resistance to her desire.
This is not the only path for our heroine. An even earlier play that survives only in fragments, Euripides’ Hippolytus Veiled, presents a Phaedra who is similarly aware of her desire but learns from it rather than resisting it. In contrast to the heroine of our fully surviving play, the fragmentary Phaedra utters lines like the following: “of boldness and courage I have a teacher most inventive in difficult situations, Eros, the most unconquerable god of all.”
As it turns out, the two Hippolytus plays with their divergent Phaedras comprise our sole surviving example of the same Greek tragedian staging the same story twice. Euripides’ Hippolytus was first staged in 428 BCE in the Theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis. Hippolytus was part of a tetralogy—one of three tragedies and a satyr play—that won Euripides first prize in 428. The other two tragedies and satyr play are not known. Hippolytus Veiled was staged at some point in Euripides’ career before 428 and was likewise part of an otherwise unknown tetralogy. According to Aristophanes of Byzantium, writing over 200 years later, our fully surviving Hippolytus corrects what was “unseemly and accusation worthy” in the fragmentary Hippolytus Veiled. Modern scholars have assumed this correction reflects Phaedra’s shame about and resistance to her sexual desire in Euripides’ fully surviving play on the story. As a translator, I think Aristophanes of Byzantium’s framing distracts from the power of Phaedra’s doubled tragic story in Euripides’ oeuvre. As Phaedra shows she understands in our surviving play, there is no way out once Aphrodite has cursed her with desire for her stepson. Whether she learns from Eros or resists, she and everyone around her still lose.
–SIMONE OPPEN
ABOUT SIMONE OPPEN
Simone Oppen teaches ancient Greek literature and language, classical mythology, and related courses as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, she directed Euripides’ Hippolytus in the original ancient Greek as part of a senior honors thesis project. This experience led her to complete a PhD in classics at Columbia University where she also had the opportunities to be part of three additional productions in the original ancient Greek—Euripides’ Alcestis, Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, and Euripides’ Ion—and to travel the world while writing her dissertation on Aeschylus and Herodotus.
ABOUT PHÈDRE
Premiered in January 1677, Phèdre is considered to be Racine’s masterpiece - the epitome of French classical tragedy, and the greatest example of the dramatic use of the 12-foot “alexandrine” verse. Racine wrote it following the same method he used for his previous plays: first research and read the material that inspired him, in this case Euripides’ Hippolytus and Seneca’s Phaedra; then lay out a “beautiful” plan of all that “his character must do,” all her goals and actions. For once the protagonist’s actions “are well set, it will be easy, for her, to say beautiful things,” as Racine explained to his son. The play revolves around its central character’s burning passion for her stepson Hippolytus, to whom she confesses her love upon learning that his father - her husband - Theseus is dead. Appalled, Hippolytus rejects her. But Theseus is alive, and his return leads the desperate Phaedra to accuse Hippolytus of trying to rape her. Theseus vows to destroy his son with Neptune’s help. Upon learning of Hippolytus’ death, Phaedra confesses everything to Theseus and kills herself.
In Phèdre, Racine proved at once very faithful to his sources and fiercely independent in his use of the material. As one critic remarked, he set the play halfway between history and myth, “which allowed the supernatural to render reality poetic without destroying verisimilitude.” Racine slightly and subtly modernized the legend — the character of Théramène, for example, was clearly modeled after tutors teaching 17th-century princely children. The succession crisis triggered by Theseus’s supposed death is, similarly, not resolved according to Greek political protocols, but rather to contemporary French ones. And Racine imbued his heroine with a very Christian sense of sin, which he deftly wove into the Pagan setting. Phèdre’s last couplet, for example, mixes the images of death and brightness (the literal meaning of the word “phaedra“ in Greek) and ends on the word “pureté” (“purity”) — hinting at the redemptive nature of her death. Although classical theory forbade the representation of death on stage in tragedies, Racine managed to circumvent it by having Phèdre poison herself offstage but die onstage, thereby achieving the dramatic effect he sought while avoiding visible blood or violence. But more than anything else, Racine’s talent lies in his use of the French language and poetry. From the overall construction of the play, full of fugue-like thematic repetitions (the monster, the poison, the confession) to the almost operatic expressiveness of the verses, many now staples of the French language, the play is suffused with a unique musicality that both defines and heightens the destiny of its heroine. It has been said that with this character, Racine wanted to offer his lover, La Champmeslé, the role of her life, in which “every passion would be expressed” with unprecedented depth and acuity. As it turns out, he accomplished far more than that, contributing to French literature one of its greatest tragic plays.
ABOUT JEAN RACINE
Jean Racine was born in Picardy, northern France, in December 1639, into a lower middle-class family. Orphaned by the age of four, he was sent to the prestigious Jansenist school of Port Royal, whose unique pedagogical methods (emphasizing French over Latin, and teaching ancient Greek as well as of modern vernacular languages) were to deeply influence his literary style. By the time he finished school, Racine had a wide, if exclusively bookish, knowledge of theatre, and a unique access to the entirety of Ancient Greek literature. Upon his arrival in Paris at age 19 Racine immersed himself in the ebullient literary and theatrical life of the capital, met Molière, became friends with La Fontaine, and soon vowed to supersede the old-fashioned playwriting style of Corneille. After a few setbacks, Racine’s career took off and he became the only playwright who not only managed to live off of his writing but also make his way up to the top of the very rigid social hierarchy. Between 1667 and 1677 he wrote and oversaw the performance of eight tragedies (among which were Andromaque, Britannicus, and Bérénice), successively became the lover of two of the most famous contemporary actresses — la Du Parc, and Marie Champmeslé, who created the role of Phèdre — and earned himself King Louis XIV’s protection. Following the creation and, if not immediate, ultimately enduring success of Phèdre in 1677, Racine became the King’s historian, stopped writing plays, settled for an arranged marriage, had seven children, and returned to the strict religious doctrine of his youth. Racine took up playwriting again at the request of the King’s secret wife Madame de Maintenon, and wrote his last two plays, Esther (1689) & Athalie (1691), for the students of Saint Cyr, the school she created for noble orphaned or poor girls. He died in April 1699, at age 59, of a liver tumor.
–MIRABELLE ORDINAIRE
ABOUT MIRABELLE ORDINAIRE
Mirabelle Ordinaire is a French director, librettist and translator. She has been collaborating with the Red Bull Theater for over a decade on the Revelation Reading Series’ French plays, and served as translator and dramaturg for the company’s production of The Maids in 2012. In 2018 she joined the Stage Directors team of the Metropolitan Opera, where she has been remounting Zeffirelli’s iconic Boheme. Directing credits in Europe include, among others, Pearl Fishers (Opéra de Dijon), Don Pasquale (ORW, Liege, Belgium), Dialogue of the Carmelites (Septembre musical de l’Orne), Sondheim’s Marry Me A Little (Studio Marigny), and Kurt Weill Story (Académie de l’Opéra de Paris).