Face Of Success

T.S. Eliot once said, "Young writers imitate. Mature writers steal."

Eliot was right. Creative plagiarism runs rampant throughout literary history. Sophocles borrowed from his own religious background, turning myth into mass entertainment. Shakespeare swiped plots from his contemporaries, illuminating dialogue to make the work his own. Then Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim stole Shakespeare, morphing Romeo and Juliet into the hit musical West Side Story. And last weekend, Duke Players brought the pattern back full circle with Rita Dove's Darker Face of the Earth, a retelling of the Oedipus myth, set on a southern plantation.

The story is familiar: A cursed baby is cast from his mother's arms and sentenced to death, but a shepherd rescues the infant and hides him in another kingdom. The child grows up to fulfill the unknown curse, killing his father and bedding his mother. Horror ensues.

Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning spin comes with a modern verse drama that incorporates song and movement. Like ancient Greek drama, which included invocations and complex dance, Darker Face of the Earth is laden with ritualistic gestures and choreography, as well as traditional spirituals dating back hundreds of years. The author tailors her story to the period, inventing a headstrong hell-raiser of a heroine named Amalia (Julie Foh). "My daddy let me run wild," she roars in a heavy southern twang, pleading with her doctor (Chris Schuessler) about a half-black love-child who opens the play with his cries. Naturally, the baby is ripped from her arms by Amalia's husband (Recess Film Editor Dan Mallory, in a tightrope walk between sanity and despair), but spared death by the physician and instead sold to a sea captain. Twenty years later, the grown-up slave is sold back to his mother's plantation. Throw in Amalia's penchant for seducing the help, and you've got the framework for a complicated dramatic journey.

The strength of the show was in its ensemble, a vocal powerhouse of strength and focus that became a character in itself. Among those shining, Kristin Jackson was sufficiently chilling as a slave sorceress, Chas Reynolds resonated as an older member of his vibrant community and Linda Munroe marked her standout debut as Phebe. Comic shades came from Martin Wilkins, the wanna-be revolutionary, and Schuessler's quick appearance as Doctor was a gorgeously quiet devotion to action. And then there was Imoh Essien, playing Augustus Newcastle. His presence alone could have driven the show, and he brightened parts of the action that easily could have gone dead.

Directed by Associate Professor Jeff Storer and designed with stunning scope by Jan Chambers, Darker Face of the Earth may go down in history with its Greek and Elizabethan predecessors and remain a dramatic classic for a long, long time. In a word, the show was astonishing. What a pity it only ran for one weekend.