Call Out the Patricide Squad
Ben BrantleyNovember 23, 2014: Though there’s no discounting the exponential possibilities of television spinoffs, it seems unlikely that a series called “CSI: Ancient Thebes” will be appearing on your screens anytime soon. If you feel this leaves a yawning vacuum in your crime-show-addicted life, you might want to take a look at A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations), the new play by Sam Shepard that opened on Sunday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Yes, you read that right. Mr. Shepard, that most enduring of American avant-garde playwrights, has sent a forensic scientist — in a trench coat, no less — into the realm of classical mythology to investigate the mysterious murder of a king at a crossroads. His conclusion: The killer was a lone assassin with a big left foot and a whole lot of rage. Not a huge surprise, huh? This is one case in which everybody has known whodunit for a few thousand years. The murder of the Theban king Laius by the son he once left for dead has inspired, among other things, a Greek tragedy (which is considered the archetypal detective story) and a psychological category for defining mama’s boys. Now, Mr. Shepard — whose work has always had a mythic cast, as well as plenty of pity and terror for the human condition — is plowing those fields seeded by Sophocles and Freud. Using a centuries-spanning arsenal of devices to consider the case — from soothsayer-readable entrails to DNA analysis — he doesn’t dig up much in the way of new insights on the once-mighty, sadly fallen, forever-damned Oedipus Rex.
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