Oedipus meets Freud.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

ASHLAND - In anger, they mock each other as "Mr. Swollen-Foot" and "Doctor Soothsayer," but Oedipus Rex and Sigmund Freud need each other to solve a primal mystery in Frank Galati's "Oedipus Complex," which had its world premiere July 31 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

As Oedipus says to Freud in their first encounter:

"Who are you? Why do you dream of me? Because I am the tyrant of Thebes? You think I will save you. I am the solver of riddles. Dream on, priest; you must help me solve this riddle of ours."

Galati is a Tony Award-winning playwright and director who has adapted works by 20th century writers including John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Anne Tyler, Mikhail Bulgakov and John Kennedy O'Toole.

When festival artistic director Libby Appel approached him about adapting and directing Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex," about a man who unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother, Galati was not sure how to adapt the nearly 2,500-year-old Greek tragedy so a contemporary audience could "engage emotionally with the inexorable unfolding of this terrible story."

His solution was to pair Oedipus up with Freud, the famous pyschoanalyst whose interpretation of his own dreams and Sophocles' play led him to the Oedipus Complex, the idea that a child naturally tends to become attached to the parent of the opposite sex and to hate the parent of the same sex.

"If Freud is a way of understanding `Oedipus,' `Oedipus' could also be a way of understanding Freud," Galati said in an interview with festival dramaturg Douglas Langworthy.

Whether Galati has succeeded in writing a play that will engage audiences emotionally is not easy to judge after seeing it once, although ``Oedipus Complex'' has moments of undeniable emotional power.

It is clear, however, that this play will engage people intellectually.

Brilliantly imagined, tightly written and expertly staged, "Oedipus Complex" brings ancient myth and modern psychoanalytic theory together, dream-weaving the struggles of two troubled truth-seekers together so adroitly that the tense dialogue between Oedipus and Freud seems perfectly natural and throws light on both men.

At the outset, standing on a black-and-white checkerboard floor in an all-black surgical theater crowded with doctors and students, Freud begins to expound his hypothesis on the psychology of children, first summarizing the myth which provided the "back story" for Sophocles' play.

At this point, two nurses roll Oedipus in on a gurney, making it clear that Oedipus is the patient whose psyche Freud is about to dissect. But the doctor really is struggling to understand his own feelings toward his late father and his attractive young mother. Just as the gods decreed Oedipus' tragic fate, Freud seems to be saying, sexually-determined emotions shaped his own psyche.

This all sounds pretty dry in print, but on stage it crackles with life, especially in direct encounters between the king and the psychoanalyst. Sophocles and Freud were both mighty good writers, and Galati slices and dices and splices their words so skillfully that it's easy to accept the convention that Oedipus and Freud can barge into each other's dreams and lives, like detectives from different precincts working the same case from different angles.

When Oedipus summons Teiresias, a blind soothsayer who might help him find the man who killed King Laius, what he gets is Freud, wearing dark glasses and asking, ``Is this the opthamology ward?''

When Freud tells Oedipus, ``Your tyrant is desire'' and then wittily free-associates to make it clear that he's talking about sexual desire, the beleaguered king gets a bit testy, and they goad each other until Freud finally tells Oedipus that he is the man whose crimes and sins have brought plague down on Thebes.

"You are unconscious," Freud says. "You do not know that those you love most ... Your love is foul. They live with you in shame. You live in calamity."

William Langan (Freud) and Jonathan Haugen (Oedipus) engage each other in these and other mano-a-mano scenes so passionately that you easily forget that this is primarily a drama of ideas. They act like two men in a life-and-death wrestling match.

Judith-Marie Bergan plays both Freud's mother and Oedipus' mother/wife. She's effective visually as Amalia Freud, an elegant young Viennese woman dressed in widow's black and a seductress's creamy white slip. As Jocasta, however, when she finally connects the dots - realizing that Oedipus ``spent himself in the womb from which he was delivered, in the house of his father, the father he murdered in his dreams and in the waking world'' - her shock and anguish barely project beyond the edge of the stage.

Gregory Linington is an important presence as leader of the chorus and as Wilhelm Fliess, a colleague who puts Freud on the couch just as Freud does with Oedipus. In both roles, Linington provides third-person perspective, at one point telling Freud - as so many modern critics have done - that, "Your dynamic psychology is an extension of your own pyschoneurosis."

One small distraction that makes it difficult to assess the play's emotional effect the first time out is that Galati's script includes some disengaging musical elements, sung in German and Aramaic (the Kaddish, as Freud's father's hearse passes by) that many may not know what to make of them without reading the script.

Assuming these mean something and are not just there to keep the audience off balance, you could almost make a case for adding supertitles at those points.

Generally, however, the production values are up to festival standards. James Schuette's set is as stark and dark as Galati calls for in his stage directions, and the staging also involves effective use of a trap door, masks and a wooden horse and carriage. The latter carries away Freud's father and then returns bearing Jocasta and Oedipus's children, including his later-to-be-famous daughter, Antigone.

Galati makes it easier to empathize with Oedipus, who committed his crimes unwittingly, than with Freud, who denounces him for not plumbing the depths of his unconscious. Galati has said that the character of Oedipus moved him as other tragic figures, such as King Lear, have not.

This is obvious in his succinct modern translation of Sophocles' last lines: ``Count no man happy until his story is over and he is free of pain.''

The lines are about Oedipus, but they also apply to Freud. And maybe the rest of us.

THEATER REVIEWS

Oedipus Complex;

Humble Boy /

When: ``Oedipus Complex'' runs through Oct. 30; ``Humble Boy'' runs through Oct. 31

Where: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland

Information and tickets: [phone]

or www.osfashland.org

CAPTION(S):

The nurses (played by Linda Morris and Dee Maaske) roll Oedipus (Jonathan Haugen) into the medical theater near the beginning of Frank Galati's new play ``Oedipus Complex.'' Oedipus, portrayed by Jonathan Haugen (front), summons Teiresias, the blind soothsayer and interpreter of dreams to help with a dire situation - though the man who arrives is a different interpreter of dreams, Sigmund Freud, played by William Langan.