Featured Review

These Seven Sicknesses

BOTTOM LINE: An admirably tackled production of epic proportions, where literary shortcomings can be largely overlooked thanks to heavy doses of charm and grit.

“A marathon presentation of contemporized and abridged Sophocles plays?” you ask in disbelief? Yes, indeed, complete with modern lingo punch lines, scores of young men with impressive beards, and copious well-executed stage blood. What’s that you utter? “Sound like five-hours of a good time!”? Well, in fact, Sean Graney’s These Seven Sicknesses, now playing at The Flea Theater, slickly coasts by surprisingly quickly, with actors themselves feeding you during two intermissions, creating quite a packaged deal and quite a satisfying evening.

Graney’s mega-play takes the seven extant plays from ancient Greece’s most notorious playwright (ok, ok, top three), shortens them, gussies them up for a young, hip audience, and sets them loose in a fifties-esque infirmary. Each segment last about 45 minutes to an hour, and takes place in the main hospital corridor. Each generally results in death and bloodshed (as only the Greeks can do), only to be carefully tidied up by the white-clad nurse-chorus who oversee all, doubling as sirens as they sanitize. Taking their turn in the ward are Oedipus, Herakles, Antigone, Philoktetes, Ajax, Elektra and Orestes, among others.