Processual Passing: Ron Vawter PerformsPhiloktetes

Abstract

Experimental dramaturge-director John Jesurun in 1994 devised a multi-media theatre adaptation of Sophocles' Philoctetes at the behest of the iconic American avant-garde actor Ron Vawter, who at the time was dying of AIDS. Feeding on classical Greek drama and Jesurun's own trademark ‘mediaturgies’ alike, this production presented its audience with a barren and alien landscape where communication is both problematic as well as the only possible means of salvation. More concretely, it featured Vawter in the lead role creating a troubling tension between the play's fictional theme of physical suffering and the ‘embodied liveness’ it highlighted through the HIV-induced purple Kaposi rash on the actor's naked body. At the same time Jesurun'sPhiloktetesis also a funeral play about a stricken warrior narrating his own demise from beyond the grave, a memento mori that unsettles its ancient predecessor by recycling the mythological story of Philoctetes the existential transgressor who refuses to either die or live as he rather opts physically to rot in the isolation of a deserted island. The production thereby deliberately dramatized the actual crossing of the border between life and death with Vawter's naked Philoktetes re-enacting and commenting the process of his passing – all while literally decaying before the eyes of the spectators. Arguably, therefore, when the stricken warrior of Jesurun's play hauntingly reminds us that “the body knows the answer” whereas we ourselves “don't know the question,” he opens up a panoply of problems with the potential to range far beyond mere descriptions of story, scene, or theme. If anything, the case of Vawter'sPhiloktetes-performance indeed indicates that drawing attention to the mediation behind the artistic creation, and particularly the physical embodiment of the actor performing it, highlights both the artificiality and – above all – the negotiability of the illusion, thereby intrinsically invalidating reductive readings.