CONFESSIONS

Fatal attraction, futile suppression, repressed passions unleashed, and…? Witness the whys and hows of confessions—and their dire consequences—in this fresh spin on Phaedra, with a multicultural cast and in minimalist chinese theatre style. For more info and to get on our mailing list, check our main page.

CONFESSIONS was performed at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, New York City, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2006. It had a successful run of five performances.

CONFESSIONS

a new adaptation of phaedra

by dongshin chang and bru dye

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cast and crew

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about the show

the confessors

all about phaedra

about the show

the confessors

aricia:

I cannot rely on free will ... omens make me anxious about the future.

hippolytus:

I live in a fairytale ... death is the only option.

oenone:

I get people to act in a way that I feel would best benefit my darling Phaedra.

phaedra:

As for my husband, Theseus, I’ll kill him if that is what it will take to be with Hippolytus.

theramenes:

I would do anything for this family and would rather die than see any bad befall them.

theseus:

I'll investigate the accusations and I'll challenge the one dearest to me.

all about phaedra

The genesis of the Phaedra myth lies in the ancient Greek stories about Theseus, perhaps the greatest of Athenian heroes. Theseus had a son, Hippolytus, by one of the Amazon women, and subsequently married Phaedra, daughter of the ruler of Crete. Hippolytus, who was raised apart from his father, scorned Aphrodite, the goddess of love, preferring the more elusive charms of Artemis, goddess of the hunt. To punish Hippolytus, Aphrodite had Phaedra fall madly in love with him. And so our play begins ...

We can see in Phaedra an attempt to grapple with the mystery of attraction and desire, and the sometimes terrible consequences thereof, which is probably why playwrights have returned to it again and again through the ages. The two most famous adaptations of Phaedra are by the great Greek tragedian, Euripides, and the 17th-century French playwright, Jean Baptiste Racine. Both of these plays focused on Phaedra as the central character in the tragedy.

In CONFESSIONS, we seek to explore the tragedies of the other characters in just as much depth as that of Phaedra. All of them have stories to tell. Toward this end, we seek to bring out the universality of the play, not by contemporizing it, but by keeping it in its Greek context while introducing elements of various performing traditions from throughout the world. Love and hate, reason and emotion--in CONFESSIONS these are not black-and-white dichotomies but merely different shades on a continuum, shared by all humanity.