Philoctetes and Heracles, yesterday and today

I watched a Theater of War event for Zoom yesterday: readings from Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Women of Trachis by Jesse Eisenberg, Frankie Faison, Frances McDormand, and David Zayas, and commentary from frontline medical providers at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx. Faison and McDormand were especially powerful readers as Philoctetes and Heracles, each of whom suffers unbearable, unallayed pain. Philoctetes’s physical agony, from a snake bite, is compounded by nine years of isolation after he is marooned by his fellow Greeks on their voyage to Troy. His cries of pain and the foul odor from his wound prompted Odysseus to suggest abandoning him. Heracles’s agony results from a centaur’s trick: what Heracles’s wife Deininara believes is a love potion is in truth a centaur’s fatal poison, which sucks the air from Heracles’s lungs and consumes his body. What Philoctetes and Heracles want in their suffering: not to be alone. “Stay with me,” Philoctetes pleads to Achilles’s son Neoptolemus. “You must stay by my side,” says Heracles to his son Hyllus. An event that lies beyond Sophocles’s Women of Trachis: it’s Philoctetes, earlier in his life, who lights the pyre that brings his friend’s suffering to an end.

The sound from Lincoln Medical Center as doctors and nurses spoke was often distorted. But one point that rang out clearly: the immensity of the suffering that the coronavirus may bring — suffering in isolation, suffering for which there’s no cure, suffering that might be difficult for someone on the outside of things to understand. I thought of the hospital photograph of Mark Anthony Urquiza shown on television on Monday night as Kristin Urquiza talked about her father’s life and death. And I heard the words “Stay with me” in a new way.

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard) : Ajax and EMTs : Antigone in Ferguson

[I’ve quoted from Bryan Doerries’s translations of the plays. Theater of War is his creation.]