I've seen a lot of off-off-Broadway and workshop productions in the past year that have played with meta-theatricality, political symbolism, and reworking classics. Some have utterly failed, some have been more successful, and some I've reviewed positively. After seeing Rising Phoenix Company's Too Much Memory at the New York Theatre Workshop, however, I've found exactly what I've been looking for but have failed to find all this time: a truly honest, tough but fair, and remarkably intelligent play that didn't implicitly apologize for its very existence.
Perhaps the smartest thing Too Much Memory does is start the play by setting humorous but very important ground rules. With no attempt to create a fourth wall (actors even greet their friends in the audience while waiting for the play to start), the "Chorus" (Martin Moran) describes the play as "an adaptation of an adaptation of a retranslation" of Antigone, while wisecracking with his fellow actors. But within this explanation of the theatrical ground rules is one of the best explanations of the nature of adaptation I've ever heard:
A director can take a Greek play and have people come on riding motorcycles, come in on motorized scenery. We don't have that kind of room. There's a hundred ways in which you can bring something into the present. We have that freedom, but like I said, in today's world, things being what they are, I think we also have an obligation. To speak up.
How I wish every other company in New York City believed this! Incidentally, that statement works equally well for coping with tragedy. Tragedy, Moran points out later, never ends well—one of things that makes tragedy so upsetting is how inevitable and arbitrary things are. That lack of justice applies equally well to politics, which is what ties this adaptation of an adaptation of a retranslation of Antigone together.
In previous generations, it was the responsibility of the young to speak up, and the responsibility of the old to react when the young had a point. Now, with a generation taught that the system of justice is hopelessly arbitrary, that instinct to speak up has been silenced by the same people who initially were doing the speaking up. Playwrights Keith Redden and Meg Gibson have recognized that while justice and laws may not follow any logical standards, the instinct to speak up, to fight against injustice no matter how pointless, can never be fully overcome. They're lucky to have a 2000-year old play that almost too perfectly fits those beliefs.
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