Phedre

On Friday night, Schlub and the Missus got all gussied up and headed on down to F Street and the new Harman Hall for opening night of Shakespeare Theater's "Phedre." The Schlubs grabbed a curbside table at Rosa's Mexican Food a mere four doors down, drank wine and ate Rosa's truly ambitious guacamole dip wondering what the poor people were doing tonight. I ordered the prawns on rice, thinking, you know, lots of big shrimp draped over a bed of white and it was big shrimp, all right, three full grown prawns, shells intact, standing on a bed of black rice (odd, that) staring at me with just the slightest bit of malevolence. Prawns, once you get to tearing them apart, don't really have a lot of meat. Think of skinny lobsters. Mrs got the poblano, but her chicklen was ground, not shredded, greatly offending her delicate culinary sensibilities. It was a somewhat cool night, enough of a breeze to take the edge off and make sitting there in a wool suit and too-tight tie not such a bad proposition. Across the street from the Verizon Center, a New Orleans Jazz Band formed up and started playing and, my, those guys were good.

The play? Oh, yes, there was a play. Helen Mirren was the lead, yes, that Helen Mirren, my favorite role of hers being this one:



Tanya Kirbuk







And there's other things she's done, Excalibur, the Queen, all that.

But, this was Phedre, a 1677 French translation/adaptation of Euripedes by Racine. Probably rousing stuff back then, but, well, times change. Do not get Schlub wrong, he is quite enamored of Greek plays, thinking Aristophanes one large hoot, but, hey, this was Phedre. And Greek plays, by and large, consist of several characters standing around talking. And talking. And talking. All. In. The. Most. Breathless. Declaiming. Overexerted. Method. Possible.

Now, not taking shots here- the play was well done, good acting, especially John Shrapnel (what a great name) as Theramene (which sounds like an anti-depression pill). And it was a pretty complicated story to pull off: Phedre has the hots for stepson Hippolytus who has the hots for Theseus' enemy's daughter Aricia (played by sloe-eyed babe Ruth Negga) while Theseus, Phedre's husband and king of Athens, is off doing whatever (bedding thousands of nubile Greeks, according to the Therameister) but everyone thinks he's dead so Phedre makes a play for Hippolytus who must be gay because he rejects her (it's Helen Mirren, dude, she's got that older babe thing going) but maybe he's not because he really, really likes the Aricia chick and then, of course, Theseus shows back up and everyone's in big trouble. We learned all the nuances of this cross-currented-plot-subplot-subsubplot of who wants to bang who by everyone standing around and talking. And talking. And talking.

About the first hour into it, I concluded Phedre just really needed to get laid. Would have saved a whole lotta grief and dead people if she'd just boinked one of her guards. But, then, we wouldn't have had three hours of people standing around talking. And talking. And talking. Would we?