THE LOVE OF THE NIGHTINGALE | LIVEWIRE CHICAGO THEATRE
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You can see why this one gets left out of everything from children’s collections to Mary Zimmerman’s famed staging of Ovid’s magnum opus. But the story isn’t entirely marginal–Keats and T.S. Eliot refer to Philomele, and it plays into Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: when the bad guys rape Titus’s daughter Lavinia, they don’t just cut out her tongue–they cut off her hands too. No tapestries for her. Lavinia still manages to communicate how she’s been wronged, showing her father a copy of Metamorphoses opened to the Philomele chapter.
Not that Wertenbaker doesn’t tinker with the story. She elides the cannibalism to make the sisters more sympathetic and introduces a metatextual device, a performance of a snippet of Euripides’ Hippolytus, that inflames and encourages Tereus’s passion for Philomele, essentially inverting the thrust of Hamlet’s play within a play. But the collective authorship of myth allows this kind of variation, even to the point of surreal simultaneities. Gods and heroes share multiple, conflicting lineages; sometimes Ovid irons out inconsistencies in the Wikipedia-esque mythic sprawl by bluntly placing transformed characters in tales that precede their transformation and vice versa. Because the symbolic logic of myth anticipates postmodernism, postmodern underlinings and flourishes are unnecessary and distracting–as Wertenbaker’s elegant adherence to classical form indicates.
