Question: what kind of lunatic would stage a twelve-hour marathon mash-up of all thirty-two surviving Greek tragedies?

Answer: my kind of lunatic.

That much shouldn’t surprise any regular reader of this blog. I’ve been a fan of Sean Graney’s Hypocrites for a number of years, because he’s interested in many of the same questions I am. What is theater for? What can it do for us, individually and collectively, that other art forms cannot? How can we make our theatrical heritage live in the present? What could a modern audience experience that would approximate the meaning of theatrical experience for our ancestors?

He’s explored these questions in his radical adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan, William Shakespeare, and, in his most ambitious efforts, Greek tragedy. Now he has returned to that deepest of wells, and come up with a truly extraordinary work: an attempt to re-create, for contemporary sensibilities, the experience of attending an Athenian theatrical festival.

Graney’s latest, monumental work, All Our Tragic, takes the entire corpus of Greek tragedy as it has come down to us, and re-works it into a single piece of theater that follows something very like the structure of a traditional festival day in Athens. Their days would be filled with three plays of a trilogy, followed by a fourth, satyr play on similar themes. Graney’s play is divided into four parts: the first, centered on the story of Herakles; the second, on the story of Oedipus; the third, on the Trojan War; and the last, on the aftermath of that war, particularly as reflected in the Oresteia.

Various other stories are told alongside these central strands; Euripides’s Medea, Alkestis and Hippolytus all get woven into the Herakles cycle, for example, while Ion gets grafted onto the Oedipus cycle. And some stories appear to have been lost altogether; if The Bacchae showed up, I missed them, and frankly, we’re talking about the Bacchae; if you could possibly miss them, then they can’t really have shown up. But that’s a quibble, because Graney isn’t attempting to stage these tragedies as originally conceived. He’s creating something new out of the stories of the past.

He’s also less interested, this time around, than he has been in past outings in some of the conventions of Greek tragedy. He’s never gone in for masks, but in the past he’s been very interested in the role of the chorus. Not this time: the three “Odd Jobs” who introduce each act and play musical interludes do not function as stand-ins for the community (nor, as in These Seven Sicknesses, as nurses tending to the maimed and wounded victims of universal tragedy). Less bothersome is that there is no deus ex machina; the gods have been pretty thoroughly banished from Graney’s world. But these omissions are in the service of cleanly, directly, and without distraction, telling the new story that Graney wants to tell.

This story goes something like this:

In the beginning, we are children, with childish notions of manhood and womanhood, and the monumental chthonic terrors of childhood. This is the age of monsters – beginning with an army of cyclopses (who recur, later, as zombie cyclopses) who threaten the Seven Sisters, preternaturally youthful women who will go on to marry or mother (or both) many of the male characters. And of heroes – chief among them Herakles (a delightfully understated Walter Briggs), a man-child who carries around a children’s storybook, longing only to earn a place in it, and earn the right to free Prometheus (a wearily skeptical Geoff Button).

Though the events are gruesome – Phedre (a wide-eyed and very funny Christine Stulik) raped by her horned son; Alkestis (a very sexy Lindsay Gavel) transformed into a flesh-eating Gorgon; Herakles’s flesh seared off by his jealous wife, Dejanira (Tien Doman, treading a very difficult line with this brutalized but always cheery character) – the tone is light. The main villain of Part I is an ostentatiously silly necromancer (Maximillian Lapine), and the cyclopses are led by a four-eyed brother doing a Woody Allen impersonation (Ryan Bourque, who also plays a distracted Theseus). Even Medea (a furious Dana Omar) has been reduced to a goth high schooler. The most memorable line of this early section of the play comes from Phedre, after her buddy, Medea, has offered to watch her kid so she can go out with Theseus; Phedre coos to her baby, “I know Medea’s not a good babysitter.”

Even secondary characters with apparently more adult concerns – like Zeke Sulkes’s goat-footed Aegeus (full disclosure: my nephew), who desperately wants a child – articulate them in a fairy-tale tone. It’s a familiar tone to Graney-watchers, but also to the culture at large: from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or the first half of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It’s the clever child – or, better yet, soulful sophomore – and part of what’s interesting about the rest of the play is the way in which that tone evolves when Graney comes face to face with material that is decidedly post-high-school.

Part II is called “Politics,” but this isn’t really an accurate description. In the background, we’re aware that while Thebes is mired in perpetual turmoil, Athens has, under Theseus’s leadership, become a democracy – whatever that is supposed to mean, because this play isn’t interested in politics. We remain in Thebes, and in Thebes what present as political problems are really familial: Oedipus’s tangled involvement with his mother; his sons’ rivalry for the throne after his departure; his daughter’s filial commitment to her father and brothers – whereas politics, as we understand it (and, I imagine, as things work somewhere off-stage in Athens) is what you get when you finally transcend these impacted relationships and start relating as neighbors.

This section is the tightest of the four, with the clearest narrative arc – and with many of the strongest performances of the whole marathon. It’s anchored firmly in the Oedipus story, but what’s interesting is that the main arc doesn’t focus on Oedipus (John Taslan) and his relationships with Jocasta (a frantic but still very funny Stulik, who once again gets the best line, “Nothing helps except time. Time – and bleach.”) and Antigone (a coldly fierce Erin Barlow), but on Creon (Sulkes again), who, in Sophocles’s plays, is never the central focus. Creon has been given a romantic backstory with Tiresias (Gavel again, giving a bitter and sadly funny performance that was my favorite of her four offerings), and a step-fatherly relationship with Ion/Haemon (Luce Metrius, also doing some of his most winning work, though occasionally upstaged by his own pet tortoise) that feels like it might satisfy a thirst that never was slaked back when he was playing Aegeus.

Graney’s Creon is quite happy being second banana, and would be happier if he could give up on Thebes entirely and spend time alone with his family. But like Michael Corleone, just when he thinks he’s out they pull him back in, over and over, until he literally has to bury all his hopes, and all his love. It’s a powerful arc, but it’s notable how young Creon seems, even at this point in the narrative where he’s at the end of his story. This is not a world-weary Creon, but a Creon who has just launched upon the uncharted waters of adulthood, and is still reeling from the cost.

That cost is nothing compared to what it takes to launch a thousand ships in Part III, “Patriotics.” This is the Trojan War section of the marathon, and to my mind it is the weakest section of the four. Act 5, the first half of Part III, is largely a re-telling of the story of Iphigenia (Gavel yet again) – in other words, the story of a man, Agamemnon (Briggs again) who murders his daughter because he thinks it is necessary. As I watched this situation play out, I became less and less convinced of the reality of the situation being described – only Tien Doman’s forceful performance as Clytemnestra truly carried me with it.

Part of the problem, I think, is that Graney has let many of the other characters off the hook of difficult emotions. Euripides’s Achilles, like Homer’s, is a furious creature of honor; Graney’s is a perfect gentleman (and, as Metrius plays him, a rather soft-spoken one). Menelaus in the source material is brooding, bitter, vengeful; Graney’s Menelaus (another role played by Bourque) is rather diffident about the whole business, more interested in getting a good cup of tea than in getting his wife back. The common soldiers, meanwhile, whom Agamemnon fears will turn on him if he backs out of the war, are played by the Neo-Titans, a group of thugs-for-hire who also play the cyclopses in Part I and Polynikes’s clownish company of weekend warriors against Thebes in Part II. They are not, in other words, endowed with very much humanity; they are an irrational force for violence unleashed for . . . well, for no particular reason, since the war is no longer about honor.

A related, even more troubling problem, to me, reared its head when Iphigenia declares herself ready for death. She does not, in Graney’s text, choose to face death freely and with honor rather than accept an ignoble death at the hands of the mob. Rather, the sense I got was that she was trying to make things easier on everyone – on Achilles and the Greeks generally, but particularly on her father. That is, needless to say, a very, very troubling place to go, and I didn’t sense that Graney fully cottoned on to how troubling it is. And as I thought more and more, I realized that she is not the only willing victim among Graney’s tragic women. His Phedre, in part I, dies readily at the hands of her monstrous son. His Antigone, in Part II, played with great steel right up until the end, suddenly, after being buried alive, swerves to comfortable reconciliation with her death, and telling everybody not to worry about her. Even Clytemnestra, in Part IV, welcomes Orestes into her arms, though she knows he comes to kill her.

I found more to latch on to in the second half of Part III, where the story of Achilles’s son, Neoptolemus (Sulkes yet again) and the marooned Philoktetes (a world-weary Danny Goodman), comes to the fore; when Troy gets sacked, and we meet Stulik’s truly terrifying Cassandra, the knitting prophetess. But we’re still left with an Agamemnon who is ready to murder his daughter to get elected president of Athens, or some such. I didn’t feel any pity or terror at his choice. I just thought: well, that’s obviously evil. And looked forward to his bath.

Part IV, “Poetics,” focuses on the Oresteia, and to the extent that it does it is marred from the start by the unresolved understanding of Agamemnon’s primal crime. Graney had more success, I think, when he tackled this story from Elektra’s perspective, as he did in These Seven Sicknesses, his adaptation of all of Sophocles. Now Clytemnestra and Orestes (Button again) come to the fore. Graney avoids directly confronting Agamemnon’s crime, and instead makes Cassandra’s appearance the focus of Clytemnestra’s ultimate ire (a repeat of the earlier scene between Dejanira and Herakles). And poor Orestes he just really wants to give a hug to, and the only one available to provide it is the ghost of his mother.

But while the center of Part IV is flawed, the periphery fairly bursts with energy and life. A marooned Menelaus’s encounter with a second Helen, and consequent need to decide whether the woman so many died for is really his wife or an evil sorceress, suddenly becomes a charged, manically dangerous figure. And Helen herself (Emily Casey, absolutely perfect as a self-described “sexy kindergarten teacher”) deepens from a spoiled trophy bride to something altogether more horrifying. But the most inspired innovation is for Neoptolemus to open a theme park on the ruins of Troy, there to reenact the war for spectators – and, in private, to reenact his own ultimate crime of killing his captive, Polyxena (Barlow again). This is a potent synecdoche for Graney’s entire enterprise, as well as exceptionally bitter comedy when we see Neoptolemus as an adult (he’s put on quite a bit of weight, and a ridiculous mustache, and seems the buffoon, but when we see the reenactment, he’s deadly serious).

And it’s also a very plausible destination for that journey to adulthood that this day of theater describes: from childhood monsters and dreams of glory; through the painful assumption of adult responsibilities, including the responsibility to cause pain to those you love; on to a contest with other adults in which what you should hold most dear is often sacrificed to ephemeral goods like honor and status; and finally, to reflection on that fact, and the creation of art ostensibly to pass on the lessons learned, but really because we cannot escape these traumas, that we have suffered and that we have inflicted. We can only choose whether to repeat them in life, or on the stage.

I don’t know whether that’s what the Greeks thought tragedy was for, but I don’t care. It’s a vision for our times, and in Graney’s hands, and that of his extraordinarily talented and committed cast and crew, it has beautiful clarity, boundless energy, and all the pity and terror that tragedy is supposed to inspire.

All Our Tragic is gone for now, but it’s coming back to Chicago in the summer of 2015. Watch for it!