All Our Tragic, a 12-hour long festive adaptation of Greek tragedy, was a smash hit for Hypocrites theatre company in 2014. The play knitted together the plotlines of all 32-surviving works of Greek tragedy (that is, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) and references in myths known from other sources.
While staged in an inviting, small interior space at The Den Theater in Wicker Park in Chicago, a setting nothing like the Theater of Dionysius –an open-air venue on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis that could hold upwards of fourteen thousand spectators — All Our Tragic managed to conjure some elements of theater culture of Greek antiquity. The Athenian City Dionysia, for example, was a four-day festival that included processions, sacrifices, singing, and dancing as well as dramatic productions. The main events were full day-long sessions of multiple plays produced in the Theater of Dionysius. The festival staged fifteen different dramatic performances: five performances per day for three days. Each day featured a trilogy of tragedies by a single playwright in the morning followed by a satyr play by a different dramatist. In each afternoon the Athenians staged a single comic drama by a different author/producer.
All Our Tragic recalled the immersive circumstances of the dramatic productions of the ancient City Dionysia. Hypocrites created “an atmosphere in which moving around is encouraged” (The Chicago Tribune 8/6/2014). Punctuated by intermissions that included communal meals it also promoted opportunities for conversations between theater-goers and performers. Perhaps to make sure the ancient stories fully engaged a contemporary Chicago audience in a powerful and unsettling way that might recall the intensity of the ancient event, All Our Tragic depicted on stage in highly styled ways some of the violence included in the ancient plots that, in the ancient sources, happened off-stage (for example, Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon, Ajax’s frenzied slaughtering of sheep). Strikingly, as a critic noted, the audience and cast together achieve “a sense of mutual accomplishment,” as if they had completed “a shared marathon” (The Chicago Tribune 8/12/2014).
Critics lauded All Our Tragic as “the signature achievement of the off-Loop year” and “the kind of show you can see only in Chicago” (The Chicago Tribune; 12/14/2014; 7/3/2015). Sean Graney was called Chicago’s “best avant-garde director” (Chicago Magazine) for having produced “a watershed moment for off-Loop theater” (The Chicago Tribune, 8/29/2014). All Our Tragic ran in 2014 and again in summer 2015. In October 2015 it won was five Jeff Awards
[GD]
REVIEW: ‘All Our Tragic’ by The Hypocrites
The Hypocrites Dine With the Audience During 12-Hour Greek Drama