Day 170/365 - Ion

Tonight I went to the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Sidney Harmon Hall to attend a performance of the play "Ion" by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, as recently re-translated by David Lan. For a play that's over two thousand years old, it's awfully funny and entertaining. The story arises from, as many Greek tales do, a liaison between a male god and a mortal woman. Their resulting offspring, left abandoned in the wilderness by his mother, grows up to become a temple attendant who knows neither his name nor his origins.

When his mother, now queen of Athens, accompanies her husband on a pilgrimage to consult the oracle of the temple her lost son serves, the action is set in motion and leads to joy, jealousy, confusion, murderous plots, reunions, and divine intervention. Not to mention more than a few laughs. The play is very irreverent for its time, openly criticizing the gods for their hypocrisy in punishing the sins of mankind while they flagrantly sin themselves and reciting the timeless plaint against a heaven that allows the wicked to prosper while the righteous suffer.

The performances in "Ion" are uniformly excellent. There is not a single off note or weak actor amongst the cast. The set design is simple but effective and the descent of divine characters from the rafters of the theater is handled well, as is the use of puppets to relate the prelude to the play. The costumes are done in a way that neatly marks the divide between the spiritual and the mundane, the permanent and the impermanent, with the gods and temple servants arrayed in the traditional dress of ancient Greece and the visitants to the temple attired in modern clothes.

The play is short, clocking in at a well-paced 90 minutes without intermission, and the Harmon Center itself is a very pleasant, convenient, and effective venue. Even though "Ion" concerns a time and a people that have long since passed, it remains relevant today. In fact, given that the play in essence concerns the circumstances and consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, it's hard to see how it could be any more contemporary.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200 and processed using the watercolor effect on an old version of Microsoft's Photo Editor program)