E-Mail This Article to a Friend Son and lover The ART takes on Oedipus BY SALLY CRAGIN

Mothers and sons have never been the same since Oedipus. In Sophocles’s fifth-century Greek tragedy, the king of Thebes presides over a sickly city under the shadow of a famous prophecy. When Oedipus discovers that he has indeed murdered his father and married his mother, he blinds himself. Freud made much of this ancient story, as have child-development mavens, but in its original form it’s a chilling saga, with themes that extend far beyond the parent/child relationship. Oedipus reveals how a community’s health is entwined with the soundness of its leadership, a lesson every generation needs to learn.

As the play begins, the polis is in dire straits. "They had just finished a war and gone through a plague," explains American Repertory Theatre artistic director Robert Woodruff, who’s presiding over the ART production of the drama that opens May 15. "They were about to enter another war. The play is an inquest . . . it’s a society investigating itself to find the source of its sickness." This Oedipus will mix old and new traditions by including an original score and vocal parts by area composer/clarinettist Evan Ziporyn that will be sung in the original Greek. The company will use a translation by Stephen Berg and classicist Diskin Clay that’s been "pared down and made more essential," says Woodruff. "We also have an Indonesian singer, I Nyoman Catra, often singing against Western music, so there’s this ancient sound."

Ziporyn, who is head of the music and theater-arts department at MIT and a member of the experimental-music troupe Bang on a Can All-Stars, is making his ART debut. He was drawn to the project because "Greek tragedy came out of the choruses — it was a way of doing something in theater where the music was essential." He selected exotic instruments that include Javanese gong, metal bars, and Chinese drums for the "sound world" as well as more familiar instruments. "It does use cello, bass, and guitar and a lot of non-Western percussion," he says of the score, "but I’m treating all those instruments in an unusual way because I’m putting them through amplification and distortion. [His guitarist will be wielding a half-dozen stomp boxes.] I started to think of the play as this strange ritual. The drama is playing out something everyone knows is going to happen. It’s how people face a truth they already know but have avoided facing."

Apart from a musical quartet, there will be a nine-person Chorus that includes Catra, whose Balinese style fits in well, according to Ziporyn. "Balinese singing is very strange to Western ears. It’s a whole different way of using the voice, and the way he’s interwoven with the other singers will be a striking thing." A traditional element will be the use of a Chorus Leader who explains the action and represents the population; he’ll be played by ART vet Thomas Derrah. "It’s all very exotic to have to be learning music that’s very actable and very dense," the actor muses. "It’s really amazing to be in the middle of something so modern but to think it’s been done 2500 years ago and survived." Derrah will be speaking the translation but also speaking and singing parts in Greek, the actual words Sophocles used. "They’re great sounds," he says, "very muscular."

And the play’s universal themes? "I think it’s about a society and culture that’s living with a secret and a kind of complicity with that secret — an agreement about its history that they know to be a lie," says Woodruff. "I think societies are often founded on half-truths that become the history as written. The lies remain very deeply buried, and when they’re uncovered, there’s a chance either for expiation and release, or perhaps the collapse of that society, which is why they kept it buried in the first place."

Oedipus is presented by the American Repertory Theatre May 15 through June 12 at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $12 to $69; call (617) 547-8300.