On an interpretive level, Conser’s tripartite casting emphasizes the different sides of this complex and sympathetic woman. This bold choice has the practical benefit of dividing up a large number of lines, which might be too much for any one performer. What is happening?Ĭonser has cast three different actresses in the part of Deaneira. Then a third enters, this time from the palace. While Deaneira speaks, another actress, identically costumed, enters from the grove of trees. In a monologue she describes her marriage to Heracles and her unease at his long absence.
She is dressed in white and silver, with a headdress that gleams like the full moon above her pale face.
Deaneira (Elizabeth Heintges) emerges from the palace, carrying a lantern. The stage design (by Ashley Simone and Ashley Setzler) is minimal, with the studied asymmetry of a Japanese garden: the façade of a palace on one side of the stage, a stand of saplings on the other. In metaphors of the beasts he has conquered, the robe lays low the civilizing hero of man.
When Heracles puts on the robe, it clings to his flesh, devours his limbs, tears at his bones, feeds on him like a serpent. But the potion turns out to be a poison, the dying Centaur’s last revenge. She will prepare a robe for Heracles, anointed with what she believes to be a love charm, given to her long ago by the Centaur Nessus. When she learns that Heracles is in love with another woman, Iole, for whose sake he has sacked an entire city, she assumes an attitude of wisdom and acceptance: “Whoever stands up to Eros like a boxer is a fool for he rules even the gods just as he pleases, and he rules me how should he not rule another woman like me?” In the next scene, however, Deaneira cannot bear the prospect of sharing her bed with Iole, imagining the two women “waiting under a single blanket for him to embrace.” In her distress, jealousy, and shame, she settles on a desperate plan. She begins in a state of anxiety and vague hope, wishing for sure news of her husband. The longest speaking role in Sophocles, Deaneira is a woman of remarkable sensitivity. Yet for the first three-quarters of the play Heracles does not appear, and Deaneira dominates the stage. Trachiniae, like the Odyssey or Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, is a story of nostos: its central action is the return of the hero Heracles to his wife Deaneira and his children in Trachis. As the Chorus declare in their majestic first song, Never has Zeus, the king of all things, But instead of settling on any one truth, we wend our way among these different alternatives. The play seems to propose a set of binary oppositions: man and woman, old and young, wild and domestic, day and night, speech and song. If a strophe is a “turn,” then an antistrophe is a “turn back,” a “return.” This concept of strophe and antistrophe, turning and returning, informs every aspect of the excellent production of Sophocles’ Trachiniae by the Barnard/Columbia Ancient Drama Group, under the direction of Anna Conser.
The basic pattern of the choral odes of Greek tragedy is the alternation of strophe and antistrophe – paired stanzas that correspond in meter, music, and (some scholars would argue) choreography. Figure 1: Elizabeth Heintges (photo: Joseph Henry Ritter)