Oedipus

The most drop-dead image you'll see on any area stage this season - I say this without qualification, although the season still has 2 1/2 months to run - occurs at the climax of Oedipus the King, the stunningly mounted version of Sophocles' tragedy that the Wilma Theater has brought to the converted atrium of the former First Pennsylvania Bank branch at 13th and Chestnut Streets. All evening long, the principals in director Blanka Zizka's production have entered and exited the playing area through a large upstage portal that designer Andrei W. Efremoff has flanked with a pair of stage-high walls - walls that, when breathtakingly lit by Jerold R. Forsyth, seem alive with vaguely human figures etched deeply into their faux limestone surfaces.

The Oedipus Rex that visiting German director Heinz-Uwe Haus has created for Villanova Theatre takes a while to find its rhythm and interest the audience in the plight of the central character, but when it does, this show becomes as dramatically involving as it is theatrically compelling. Haus' conception of Sophocles' tragedy emphasizes the role of the chorus, and for about the first third of the two-hour, intermissionless production the highly energized staged choral interludes quite overwhelm the rather stiff performances by the masked characters of the drama.

The much-discussed Off-Broadway comedy Oedipus in Palm Springs begins with numerous surgeon general-style warnings: It's full of sexual content, language and nudity, not to mention much boozing and smoking, in a list so long that the audience is applauding by the end. Those who fear sanitation of the arts are lucky to have fearless theatrical endeavors such as this, appearing at the Lower East Side's New York Theatre Workshop. In this case, though, the rewards are far greater than irreverent naughtiness.

After 12 years of putting on plays in the cramped Wilma Theatre, Blanka Zizka wanted a change. "I thought I'd done what I could in the Wilma space, and I was ready for exploring something larger," said Zizka, the theater's co-producing artistic director. Larger, indeed. As Zizka spoke, she was sitting in a former bank that has been transformed into a temporary theater that makes the Wilma seem like a shoe box. In this space at 15th and Chestnut Streets - with 30-foot ceilings, massive Grecian columns and a temporary stage area nearly as big as the Wilma's entire Sansom Street theater - Zizka's production of Oedipus the King was to open Friday.

If I am going to take "Oedipus" at all, I prefer to take it straight from the bottle. In the modern-dress adaptation of Sophocles' powerful 5th-century B.C. tragedy that opened Friday evening on the mainstage of the People's Light and Theatre Co., we find ourselves being poured a Winnie-the-Pooh of a wine cooler. Did Socrates, sipping the hemlock, really expect Kool-Aid? The bloodless, docile concoction brewed from this granddaddy of all horror stories by Abigail Adams and Lee Devin, who are the producing company's associate artistic director and dramaturge, respectively, wouldn't raise the fine hairs on the neck of the most innocent high school sophomore.

Oedipus and Creon, both dressed in sports jackets and ties, move in a circle, forcefully throwing a basketball back and forth as they trade accusations and angry words. In their circumnavigation of the stage they pass a hobby horse, a doll, a red wagon and three helium-filled party balloons. Yes, these are the kings of Greek myth, and this is Oedipus by Sophocles. Needless to say, the version of the drama at People's Light and Theater Company is not the usual production of actors dressed in sheets and sandals performing against a backdrop of stone steps and Doric columns.

The unquestioned star of the Wilma Theater's new production of "Oedipus the King" is its venue - the former First Pennsylvania banking floor in the Packard Building at 15th and Chestnut streets, whose massive Ionic columns, marble accouterments and sweeping staircases, transformed by scenic designer Andrei Efremoff into the facade of a royal palace in ancient Greece, works surpassingly well in the context. One can say, though certainly not without impunity, that the site makes possible a magnificent Oedipus complex.

There will always be a press agent. The other day, the Wilma Theater sent out a release whose heading blazed: "The Wilma Theater Moves 5 Blocks Closer to Broad Street for the Upcoming Production of 'Oedipus the King.' " Visions of a marvelous photo-op danced through my head: a giant self- propelled crane ripping the modest Wilma stage out of its row at 2030 Sansom and rumbling on up to 15th and Chestnut to deposit it at the Packard Building. No such luck. The release goes on to explain that the production, slated to run from April 4 to May 1, "has outgrown the confines of our small space" and will be ensconced instead in the cavernous 12,000-square-foot former banking floor of the First Pennsylvania.

Oedipus at FDR. Fires crackle and blaze out of trash cans. We're sitting on the ground in a concrete bowl under I-95, with music (the endlessly brilliant James Sugg) throbbing into our brains through earphones. Trucks rumble overhead. Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey found this astonishing venue, conceived and directed this thrilling version of the myth of Oedipus at Colonus (written by Suli Holum) and assembled a fine and diverse cast, including a chorus of skateboarders. Blind, exiled, wandering the world, Oedipus (Pearce Bunting)

It's safe to say that Sophocles, who wrote Oedipus at Colonus as a kind of valedictory and summing-up near the end of his 90-year life, would be quite baffled by the stomping, shouting resurrection musical that Lee Breuer and Bob Telson made of his play in 1983. Yet it's also a good bet that if the old Greek had seen The Gospel at Colonus, which is what Breuer and Telson called their version of Oedipus' sanctuary and ultimate death, it probably wouldn't have offended his notion of what good theater ought to be. Theater, Sophocles might have said, should stir the blood of the populace with stories of great events, stories that plumb the deepest mysteries of human existence.

Quintessence Theatre Group's mission is to tangle with the classics, and this time, they tackle Jean Anouilh's wartime adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone . A response to Nazi occupation of France, the tragedy, as reimagined for a 20th-century audience, trades the wrath of the gods for existential dilemma, allowing man and woman to blunder about on their own, making terrible decisions for terrible reasons. Antigone, you may recall, is the daughter of Oedipus and daughter/granddaughter of Jocasta, both dead.

Musician Roger Davidson wouldn't usually make it into Tattle - he's neither a drug-addled rock star nor prone to wardrobe malfunctions. He's the founder and president of the Society for Universal Sacred Music. But lose $20 million to a con and you're bound to catch Tattle's eye. The scammers, near Davidson's home in Katonah, N.Y., used a virus he found on his own computer to convince him of threats against him from Central America, Opus Dei and the CIA, a prosecutor said yesterday.

The pulsing, insistent triplet figure shared by the cellos, double basses, and timpani at the end of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex has a way of following you out of the hall, down the street, and hounding you. It's a quiet way of ending a horrific piece, yet the triplets won't let go - the three beats like drops of life leaving Oedipus and the bodies of his parents. It is the job of an orchestra, in addition to everything else, to take risks and lead public taste. That's easy to forget in an age when the act of curating programming has so closely elided with channeling the customer's wishes.

James Sugg, a prolific Philadelphia actor, sound designer, and composer who works with many theaters in the region, won the prestigious Obie Award in New York last night as best actor in an off-Broadway show this season. Sugg, a 10-year member of Philadelphia's Pig Iron Theatre Company, won for his performance in Pig Iron's Chekhov Lizardbrain, a high-concept piece that is, on the surface, about three brothers fighting over an inheritance. "It's a great honor," Sugg said in his short acceptance speech, in which he thanked the Obie committee for recognizing him, as well as a play "obviously audiences responded to. " Chekhov Lizardbrain was a critical success, as well as a box-office hit, in New York when it ran during October at the Ohio Theatre in Manhattan's Soho district.

Who would have thought that about-to-turn-50 Pearce Bunting, who made an enduring name for himself in Philadelphia as an intensely edgy character actor, would be singing and dancing as the sexy Australian "dad" in Mamma Mia!? And in spandex, yet? But there he was one January night not long ago, on the stage of Manhattan's Winter Garden Theater, doing the big Broadway thing, charming the ruffled socks off the little girls in the audience - not to mention their moms. Theatre Exile's production of Blackbird (in previews, opening Wednesday at Plays & Players Theatre)

Oedipus at FDR. Fires crackle and blaze out of trash cans. We're sitting on the ground in a concrete bowl under I-95, with music (the endlessly brilliant James Sugg) throbbing into our brains through earphones. Trucks rumble overhead. Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey found this astonishing venue, conceived and directed this thrilling version of the myth of Oedipus at Colonus (written by Suli Holum) and assembled a fine and diverse cast, including a chorus of skateboarders. Blind, exiled, wandering the world, Oedipus (Pearce Bunting)

The much-discussed Off-Broadway comedy Oedipus in Palm Springs begins with numerous surgeon general-style warnings: It's full of sexual content, language and nudity, not to mention much boozing and smoking, in a list so long that the audience is applauding by the end. Those who fear sanitation of the arts are lucky to have fearless theatrical endeavors such as this, appearing at the Lower East Side's New York Theatre Workshop. In this case, though, the rewards are far greater than irreverent naughtiness.

Alexander stars Colin Farrell in a blond mullet and miniskirted toga as the conqueror dude later tagged "the Great. " So misconceived, so shrill, so fetishy is Oliver Stone's epic, so unintentionally hilarious a stew of paganism and Freudianism, that it makes Conan the Barbarian look like Gladiator. Not coincidentally, Stone cowrote Conan, which Alexander resembles in that the characters don't talk but declaim! Alexander, who lived from 356 to 323 B.C., was the king of Macedonia, unifier of Greece, annexer of Asia.

In October 1900, the 44-year-old Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud began treating a troubled 18-year-old woman for psychosomatic symptoms - migraines, a cough, a limp. Eleven weeks later, she left abruptly. "Her breaking off so unexpectedly, just when my hopes of a successful termination of the treatment were at their highest," Freud wrote, "and her thus bringing those hopes to nothing - this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part. " Freud's treatment of Dora opened the era of modern psychoanalysis.

The unreconstructed macho male is a rare species in America. Many believe he is extinct, but he is occasionally spotted alive in certain exotic and unregulated preserves, beyond the reach of social engineers, where patriarchal systems survive. Such as the Mafia, where the comedy "Analyze This" goes in search of a '90s man. 1590s. He is Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro), the lionhearted father and absolute authority in not one but two families. On the job, he rules an ancient criminal empire passed down from father to father, preserved through centuries of bloody male conflict.