Oedipus Director's Notes

David Daniel, Core Company actor and director and adaptor for this production of Oedipus, shares his thoughts about the play, the humanity behind it and why its vital viewing in these times. 

Oedipus Director's Notes

South African social rights activist and archbishop, Desmond Tutu explained ubuntu as, “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” It manifests the idea that humans cannot exist in isolation. We depend on connection, community and caring. We add to and aid our communities. We march, we fill sand bags, we raise money, we help rebuild, we pitch in, we volunteer, we go to funeral services, we hug each other, we make casseroles…In times of tragedy we have a desperate need to DO for each other. The poet, soldier and clergyman John Donne wrote,

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;…

Some of you reading this have been coming to APT for years. You’ve given your time, donated your money, dragged your friends …APT is because of who you are.

For many others, APT was their first job. It has been a part of divorce, marriage, birth, death, family, retirement…and through it all it has helped shape the lives of the people who are a part of it. We are because APT is.

You and we are bound together by this place.

Oedipus and his Thebes are bound together. Their journey and suffering is shared. And in times of need and pain, they, like us, will get through it together. There is so much in this play. There is a murder mystery, a love story between a leader and his people, a treatise on hubris, a debate of divine morality, a tug-ofwar between Fate and Free Will, an invitation to Sunday tea with Nihilism, and so much more. The production you are about to see is our contribution to that conversation.

I would like to add as an adapter, there were, and are, so many voices that have shaped my own. Langston Hughes, Christopher Logue, Maya Angelou, Anne Carson, Seamus Heaney, Dante, Oscar Wilde, Madeline Miller, Stephen Vincent Benet, my mother, father, aunts, uncles (all storytellers in their own wonderful ways) and thousands of writers and poets online, in schools, churches, poetry cafes, and prisons whose written and spoken words have filled my ears and soul for decades.

I am because they were.

– David Daniel