Todd Sullivan on Connor Hogan

Dear Connor (and Brooke and Elena),

When I sat down to watch Offstage Onstage: Everything You Didn’t See the Greeks Do, I didn’t have much of an opinion about what I’d seen the Greeks do, or hadn’t. I’d been in productions of Antigone and Medea and liked them both well enough, but neither left me with any real urge to seek out more of the tragedies. After watching your hilarious, inventive, and heartfelt production, I caught the contagious urgency — from you as players, and you as characters — to go read, see, and soak up The Bacchae, the Oedipus trilogy, and everything else Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus have given us.

The top of your show is incredible: the three of you locking into these garish, ghoulish death tableaus, lights snapping on and off, hitting each stage picture with total precision. Grotesque and hilarious. A sequence of fiendish, mordant two-panel comic strips of death. And what you establish right at the start of the play continues throughout: like the Greeks before you, you squeeze maximum stagecraft out of minimal technical equipment, using nothing but ingenuity and talent.

The manner in which the three of you built on each other’s gestures — completing them, echoing them, amplifying them — was mesmerizing. Often I felt I was watching the emotion of a single body reverberating through three, because one body wasn’t enough to hold the size of it. I loved seeing the fingers of one actor running along the cliff’s edge of another actor’s arm, that zoom-in, zoom-out effect. It’s an echo of what your whole show is doing: putting Greek tragedy under a microscope, then pulling back out to the whole sweep of it.

I was charmed by the enthusiasm — the nerdiness of your characters. I teach improv, and I’m always telling my students it’s okay to like stuff. at that young age, it can be an act of rebellion — like Antigone honoring her brother — to be so unguarded with your enthusiasms, as it leaves you vulnerable to attack. I was particularly moved by the line “I did this presentation so people would see me as smart,” delivered near the end of the show while Sisyphus tries to push his rock up the hill of the transparency projector — the wheeled-in classroom relic. I did this, so that someday people will have seen me as something. That grammatical tense — the conditional, the future anterior, the “in the end, this will have been worth it” tense — is the tense of faith, of hope, of striving: the dream that one day my actions will have had significance, that someday my life will be seen as meaningful. It’s the tense of Antigone, of Medea. In that single line, you illuminate all of the effort, all of the yearning, the whole dream of these characters — of these plays — of this great project that is Greek Tragedy. It was moving. It was masterful.

I thought your show was super cool.

Todd

Todd Sullivan is the creator/performer of Maniac at Dumb Hub.

Connor Hogan is one of three creator/performers of Offstage Onstage: Everything You Didn’t See the Greeks Do as a part of Cannonball.