PlayMakers: What do you find interesting about the Oedipus trilogy?
Carey: The fascinating thing for me is that Sophocles, who wrote these plays in fifth-century Athens, returned three times to tell the story of Oedipus. Why was this great artist so obsessed with the story of Oedipus? When he was young, he wrote Antigone, which is the very end of the story about Antigone, his daughter, and the disaster she faces when she tries to bury her brother.
Then, 20 years later, he wrote Oedipus Tyrannus, which is the story of how Oedipus realizes the curse upon him: that he killed his father and slept with his mother, and he blinds himself. And then, 30 years later, at the end of his life, when he was 89, Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Colonus, which is the end of Oedipus’s life.
PlayMakers: And what inspired you to rearrange the trilogy, starting at the end of Oedipus’ life?
Carey: Well, as I said, I was so curious about why a great artist would return to the same story multiple times. Did he change his mind about what the thematics or the impact of the Oedipus curse was?
Oedipus acknowledges his own guilt in the middle of the play. By the end, he’s saying: It wasn’t my fault. Fate determined this. I had no agency. One of the central conflicts in Greek tragedy is free will versus fate. Do individual, human beings have personal agency, or are we up against some kind of systemic obstacle? We’re still arguing that question today, so it’s never going to be resolved.
And that’s at the heart of the play. So Oedipus accepts his guilt. And then 30 years later, he comes on stage and says, you know, I can make a case for myself that I wasn’t guilty at all, and I didn’t know what was coming, and I shouldn’t be blamed for it. And that really puzzled me. Why was Sophocles reversing course?
PlayMakers: Why do you think this story has survived such a long time and still resonates with audiences today?
Carey: It’s such a great question. I mean, the Oedipus story and these three plays are really kind of the greatest, the heyday of Western dramatic literature.
This brilliant, rational man keeps pursuing self-knowledge, and you admire him because he’s so committed to knowing who he is. And surely we all believe that self-knowledge is our destiny as human beings. And then he realizes who he is and that he’s been completely cursed.
It’s the perfect tragedy in a way, because it’s about a man that you admire. If we didn’t admire Oedipus, it wouldn’t be tragic.
But we think he’s brilliant and laudable and caring, and he loves his wife, Jocasta, and his children, and he wants to do right by his adopted city. And then he learns who he really is. And I think that makes for great drama. It’s eternally relevant, so it never gets old.
PlayMakers: How is this play relevant to us as Americans?
Carey: Our democracy was founded upon the principles of fifth-century Athens. That’s where our founding fathers got the idea. Democracy is a radical experiment. Questions about citizenship. This whole thing we are agonizing about right now about birthright citizenship. This is something that the Greeks thought about every day. Who gets to belong? Is it someone born here? Someone who can vote?
And the idea that you have a trial and that a jury of your peers would decide what was right, the Greeks invented that.
I always resent it when people think, oh, classics, they’re dusty, they’re classics because they are forever new, and we should be in the business of always reinventing the past.
If we don’t. Our relationship with the present is very thin. And that’s why I think it’s a really exciting way for a theater that’s interested in the public square and in democracy.
And after all, this is the first chartered university in America, Chapel Hill; the first decision to offer citizens public education came here. That comes from the Greeks, you know. So I think it’s really perfect.