Summer Cab Closes With Semen And Suicide

By the time Hippolytus (Niall Powderly) has wiped two snot and semen-coated fingers on a questionably clean sock, settled into a bed-cum-bathtub filled with trash, adjusted his Burger King crown, and pulled a supersized bag of Skittles to his chest, one thing has become abundantly clear. This is probably not the prince — or the royal family that grudgingly orbits him — with whom you became familiar somewhere between Classics 101 and a seminar on French theater. 

Nope. Definitely not. This Hippolytus sneezes, pinches and rubs his unwashed genitals, finds another sock, sniffles, eats more Skittles. Doesn’t wash his hands for any of it. From the wings, there’s the faint, earthy hum of French playwright Racine turning in his grave, Seneca and the Stoics not far behind him. 

But even six feet under, they needn’t fret — and neither should the audience. A bold and modern adaptation of Seneca’s classic work, Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, on at the Yale Summer Cabaret through August 14, doesn’t stop at irreverent, gruesome, and gripping. It triumphantly brings the Summer Cab’s season to a close with a powerful meditation on desire, sexual violence, and the razor-sharp line between the two. 

Written by Kane in 1996 and directed by Yale MFA candidate Jesse Rasmussen, Phaedra’s Love draws on the narrative worlds set into motion by Seneca and Racine so long ago, but moves into darker territory, concerned and then consumed with what it means to want a body and a soul, to be fiercely in love with the idea of something, to believe that the body wields great power until you believe it suddenly powerless. Where Seneca’s Phaedra casts a sharp and fairly moralizing lens upon the title character, Kane’s swallows the whole royal family, painting a sort of jagged tableau that has a fully formed and slovenly Hippolytus at its center, a lovesick Phaedra dancing at its inner edges.

The framework is, at first, recognizable: Phaedra has it bad for her stepson, a swelling lust that has developed in her husband Theseus’ absence. She consults a doctor (Paul Cooper) who fulfills the same role that Seneca’s nurse character did years before, sensing her lust and advising her not to act on it. She does — we know from her first moment onstage, pressed up against a red curtain, that she will — and psycho-sexual chaos ensues.

But it’s not the same chaos that Seneca knew, and the play feels both timely and timeless because of it. Twisted and tumultuous surprises wait around every corner, nodding to tradition while giving Phaedra and company a violent entry into a crass and sexist modernity. Kane’s script adds Strophe, a daughter from a previous marriage. Hippolytus is obsessed with functional sex and made gleeful at the pain that it can inflict. Fellating priests and brutal rape scenes knock each other down in succession like dominoes. All of these together present the audience with a work that feels devastating and necessary, as darkly funny and complicated as being a woman itself still is. 

The Summer Cab’s creative team has taken Kane’s script to an entirely other level, bringing to life Kane’s painfully acute awareness of desire and the ways it can ravage one’s mind. An extraordinary set design by Fufan Zhang becomes a character itself, drawing a willing Phaedra into its webbing and pulling out nuances between Phaedra and Strophe, Phaedra and Hippolytus, Hippolytus and Strophe as they pose against a set dominated by black and white with foreboding splashes of red. Christopher Ross-Ewart hits a home run with a sound design that traverses layered, increasingly schizophrenic voice snippets, muffled television noises, and original compositions that heighten tension in one moment and approximate breath in the next. 

The actors, too, stick with Kane through the end. Elizabeth Stahlman is a transfixing Phaedra, giving herself entirely to the role. When she shudders with lust, audience members do too. When she dives for Hippolytus against all senses, we cannot resist getting down in the trenches with her. And when she decides to end it, no one has to ask why. Powderly is a massively contemptuous Hippolytus. Brontë England-Nelson captivates as Strophe. Even Dinkova, known for directing Antartica! and Adam Geist, makes a mark as a vulture, picking at the pieces audience member have yet to make sense of.

This beautifully done Phaedra’s Love is much more than a tribute to a young Kane’s work, or an afterthought for a brilliant and deeply in touch playwright who, three years after writing the play, committed suicide. There’s something bigger here, something left over that we’re expected to pick at after the vultures have come for Hippolytus, after the stage has been cleared of frothing blood. It is as if they have decided they owe it not just to her, but to all of us as well. 

Phaedra’s Love runs through Sunday, August 14, at the Yale Summer Cabaret. For directions and ticket information, visit the Cab’s website. Warning: this play contains brief nudity and irreverent laughter.