The Love of the Nightingale

Constellation Theatre Company frequently produces epic, myth-related theater with a modern slant. So it's natural that they would choose as the final play in their 2013-2014 season Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale, based on a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Theater in 1988, Wertenbaker took the Greek myth of two devoted sisters, Philomele and Procne, and wove it into a moving play about love, lust, brutality, and reconciliation.

But this is no conventional retelling of a well-known tale. Wertenbaker locates her play in a place at once familiar and strange. Its people talk as people today talk; they banter and joke, yet they have their feet firmly planted on the soil of the ancient world. Perhaps because it exists in this deliberately nonrealistic place, the dark nature of the piece can exist side by side with deft humor, becoming a curious mix of the gruesome and the hilarious, as nightmares — and myths — often are.

Like the original legend, the play begins with a wedding. The king of Thrace, Tereus (Matthew Schleigh), helps the king of Athens, Pandion (Edward Christian), in war. To thank him, Pandion gives Tereus his older daughter, Procne (Dorea Schmidt) in marriage. Tereus and Procne sail off to Tereus' distant home in Thrace but after several years of loneliness, Procne convinces Tereus to return to Athens to bring her beloved sister to visit.

On the trip back, Tereus' lust for Philomele overcomes him and he rapes her, cutting out her tongue so that she cannot tell what has happened. Tereus keeps the sisters separated in Thrace, but his treachery is undone when the sisters meet at an annual bacchanalian feast for women. There Philomele uses three large puppets to illustrate to Procne what Tereus did to her and to enlist her sister's help in gaining revenge. That revenge involves killing the young son Tereus so deeply cherishes. As Tereus chases after the sisters to kill them, the gods turn Procne into a swallow, Philomele into a nightingale, and Tereus into a Hoopoe.

Director Allison Stockman has gathered a well-balanced ensemble to act Nightingale. Megan Dominy is particularly impressive as Philomele, able to express the girl's exuberant romanticism at the beginning of the play and just as able to express her disgust and fury after she has suffered at Tereus' hand. Schmidt is equally fine as Procne, who cannot relate to her husband or to Thrace. Rena Cherry Brown is stunning as Philomele's servant, Niobe, the long-suffering voice of reason and resignation.

Stockman capitalizes on the imaginative foundation of Wertenbaker's text, using the lyricism of the script as a continual reminder that the story was originally a form of oral poetry. The narrative is sometimes told by choruses of women or men, sometimes by a single narrator (Ashley Ivey).

The success of this production depends primarily on the impressive work of percussionist Tom Teasley, who is a one-man band, performing on flutes, drums, and exotic Near-Eastern instruments at the back of the stage, providing a brilliant score, complete with everything from songs reminiscent of Greece and Thrace to the sound of swordplay in the Athenian war. The music beautifully aligns with choreographer Kelly King's intricate dance numbers, which run the gamut from a spirited line dance at the Greek court to a wild bacchanalian orgy in Thrace.

A. J. Guban's set is minimal and effective. On the theater's back wall, rows of vertical gold panels stretch out toward an unseen castle. The glossy black-and-red-painted stage remains unadorned. The costumes, by Kendra Rai, include tunics of varying colors with gossamer veils for the females of Greece; the women of Thrace wear broad animal-hide belts over their tunics. The men — from kings to soldiers — also wear different colored tunics and high leather sandals.

Constellation Theatre Company deserves credit for making this difficult story easy to watch. With its use of music, color, movement, and poetry, it swirls around the stage, raising more questions than it answers. But then Wertenbaker's purpose is not to give answers. Like the original Greek dramatists, she points out that what's most important is not to get explanations, but to keep asking questions of life.