‘The Gospel at Colonus’ Review: Singing Hallelujah on the Hudson

Back at the start of this century, Tom Stoppard raised some eyebrows with the copious program notes theatergoers received at his brainy Broadway play “The Invention of Love.” The Times review advised reading them, as context for understanding the performance, “before the curtain goes up.”

Audience members traipsing onto Little Island in Manhattan for the handsome revival of Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s “The Gospel at Colonus” don’t get anything of the kind, but it would have been a help. An aurally sumptuous quasi-Passion play that sings hallelujah to the heavens in the island’s open-air amphitheater, the show retells an ancient Greek drama through the prism of a Black Pentecostal church service.

“Welcome, brothers and sisters,” the Preacher (Stephanie Berry) says at the beginning, with the Hudson River glinting as a backdrop in lieu of an upstage wall. “I take as my text this evening the Book of Oedipus.”

It is a clever line. But while a pastor might be able to presume a congregation’s familiarity with a book of the Bible, it is riskier to count on a crowd knowing Sophocles’ drama “Oedipus at Colonus.” Breuer, the great downtown experimentalist who died in 2021, was all about risk. Still, let’s recap, shall we?

In “Oedipus at Colonus,” Oedipus is old, infamous and exiled from Thebes, where he once was king. His life has been a litany of scandals, which you might recall from another of Sophocles’ Theban tragedies, “Oedipus Rex”: Abandoned as an infant, he did not know his parents, so when he later killed his father in a fight, he didn’t realize who it was, and when he married his mother and had children with her, he likewise had no idea. After learning the truth, he gouged his eyes out.

Now, in his wanderings, his beloved daughter Antigone is his indispensable guide. Upon their arrival at Colonus, Theseus, the king of Athens, takes pity and offers them sanctuary.