In Phèdre, French poet Jean Racine combined Greek tragedy with good old-fashioned Christian guilt and came up with the most powerful depiction of sexual obsession ever to appear on the stage. Euripides and Seneca had dramatized the myth earlier and, as a matter of fact, in the same week Racine’s play opened in Paris in 1677, a rival Phèdre financed by his enemies also debuted, to a fuller house. No matter—in terms of tragedy, psychological insight, theological complexity, and shear heat, Racine bests them all. And a new adaptation by J. Nicole Brooks for Lookingglass Theatre Company does little to threaten his supremacy.
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Where Brooks does succeed is in the liveliness of her dialogue, a mix of high and coarse diction. “Methinks you have a crush,” someone says, or, following a long lament, “Well, this’ll certainly be a long night. Shots?” Fedra can describe herself one minute as that “crazed junkie bitch who can’t keep it together” while managing in the next some lovely lines describing her beloved as “bronzed as if the sun had licked him entirely.”
