Sophocles knew: Every family has its issues. And in his famed Theban plays, the social ramifications of this are devastating. In “Oedipus Rex,” Oedipus kills his father and beds his mother, which causes a plague to descend onto Thebes. In “Antigone,” his daughter Antigone defies her uncle, Creon, and the family strife results in a string of deaths.
In “Sophocles in Staten Island,” a pithy 33-minute film, a Filipino-American family works on a home video adaptation of those two plays while in quarantine. Beneath its charming comic veneer, the piece offers a larger lesson: what the politics of the family can reveal about the politics of the state.
Michi Barall and Sung Rno wrote the adorably self-referential digital offering, which was directed by Jack Tamburri and comes courtesy of Ma-Yi Theater Company’s new online hub, Ma-Yi Studios. It was filmed and performed by the Obie-winning actor Ron Domingo and his family, playing themselves.
Domingo is the domineering father, committed to making a quality video (or, rather, “film,” as he haughtily declares, aiming to be the next Wong Kar-wai), who ends up driving away his cast — his teen daughter, Autumn, her younger brother, Connor, and their mother, Lynn Taylor.
His delightfully silly adaptation of “Oedipus” includes a one-man choral performance and a shepherd in a toga fashioned from an Avengers bedsheet. When Autumn gets fed up with her father’s egomania, she decides to make her own video and cancel him in retaliation.
Meanwhile, Domingo continues work on Sophocles’ second play, putting on the crown as King Creon, and suddenly Autumn becomes a real-life Antigone, railing against his despotic rule. But when Lynn warns Autumn to use her anger wisely and consider how the swaths of Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets have channeled theirs into action, she decides to make her own creative statement instead.
The injuries that occur in “Sophocles in Staten Island” are superficial: hurt feelings, yes; murders and eye gouging via fashion accessory, no. (This Oedipus has not blood but ketchup on his face.)
The script is clever without being too pat, familiar without being mundane; it’s a darling bite-size snippet of theater and filmmaking during a time of disaster.
And while it at first seems as though our time with the Domingo family is merely meant to illustrate the tension between a proud sovereign — a sputtering suburban dad — and those subject to his rule, pointing beyond the home successfully introduces a bigger political context.
In the original plays, state order breaks down once family order does. This fear has made its way into American politics, where threats to the nuclear family are deployed by the right (the endangered traditional family) and the left (the family representing a body of citizens with shared values). “We are all part of one American family,” Barack Obama has said.
Real families are hardly so stable and harmonious. They are divided by politics. Family members argue, they fail to understand one another, and they become estranged. Or, in the case of Autumn and her father, they suffer from a case of creative differences.
But family is not just the parents and siblings, but the environs, the whole context of a person’s formative years. It is an inherited viewpoint or structure; resisting those rules can translate into larger social resistance.
The family should be a place for love and respect, but, as many people know in their own lives, sometimes family doesn’t always live up to this reputation; sometimes family is just what you’re born into, what you’re stuck with, no matter the conflict or injury.
“Sophocles in Staten Island” doesn’t push too hard on this, and it ends far more brightly than the Greek originals — no deaths, and ice cream all around. This Creon realizes the error of his ways and praises his daughter for making her own statement, even though it differed from his. He has faith in, and newfound respect for, the next generation.
Nationally, we too are in a moment of rebellion. We’re fighting back against our fathers and uncles wearing the crown, and right now that fight looks like a Thebes racked with conflict and ravaged by plague.
In Sophocles, fighting within a family only results in chaos; that’s the tragedy. But in the comparatively cheerful “Sophocles in Staten Island,” it’s not the warring but the inability of each side to communicate and embrace change that poses the threat.
Here an American family feuds and protests and ends up stronger for it. Sophocles may disagree, but this isn’t Thebes: It’s Staten Island.
Sophocles in Staten Island
Available online; ma-yistudios.com
