A CONSIDERABLE VOICE

an interview with actress, Erin Barlow on April 15, 2007
by Joshua Aaron Weinstein

The Mercury Café is packed with coffee drinkers, tea sippers, hardcore readers and computer screen junkies. The large warehouse turned coffee-stop, littered with wall art, randomly set couches, tables and chairs, books and a friendly service counter, offers an intellectual’s dream environment without excluding the mere passerby from basic human needs. You don’t need to wax poetic to remain in the Mercury Café, all you need is an appreciation for homegrown goodness and a taste for café splendors. On recent visits, I’ve enjoyed cold cut sandwiches or dessert cakes, but today I’m going for a cup of Joe with room to add cream and sugar. My interviewee, Erin Barlow, has ordered the same, except there is no room for cream or sugar in her cup. She is drinking her coffee black. “Always black,” she says. Barlow is hardcore.

Maybe it is her hardcore nature that has landed her the role of Procne in LiveWire Chicago Theatre’s production of The Love of the Nightingale currently running through April 29 at the side project theatre (1439 West Jarvis). Procne is an Athenian princess who is married off to the King of Thrace, Tereus, after he helps Athens win the war. Procne is the prize bestowed on Tereus by the King Pandion, Procne’s father. Living in another land away from her family is the journey playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker starts Procne on. Revenge is her end.

JAW: Talk to me a little about Procne's journey from Athens, a land of philosophy, to Thrace, a land of sport.

EB: It’s a hard transition for her. She is coming from a place where truth, wisdom and peace are the norm and her people are reluctant to be at war. She’s married off to a warrior and brought to a land where she has nothing in common with its citizens. She has no words to converse with them. Her only company is a group of savage women who are no match for her word play. She is intelligent and her engagement has left her devoid and her life becomes very depressed so she sends for her sister. It’s been a few years and she believes Philomel, her sister, is old enough to make the journey.

JAW: In my first interview on the play, I talked with Danielle O’Farrell, who plays Philomel, Procne’s sister. I asked her if she had sisters and she answered for both of you. Both of you, playing sisters, don’t have any sisters of your own, but you have friends who you consider sisters?

EB: Of course.

JAW: How far would you travel for them?

EB: Anywhere they needed me to go. What did Danielle say?

JAW: I don’t know where I wouldn’t.
JAW: And so, her sister is sent for and assumedly is being brought to Thrace to reunite with Procne, who has now become immersed in the Thracian culture. We even see this visually with costume and make-up by designer, Erin Fast. There is a change in the Procne's character.

EB: At this point, her husband has been gone for 2 months. Along with the lack of conversation, she has no matrimonial relationship. She doesn’t know what’s going on and for all she knows she could be a widow. Which means she would be in charge of this country. She’d be the one running the show. She attempts to acclimate with the women she has previously silenced. She needs to get in with the Thracian women to see if they have civility enough to stand behind her.

JAW: But her husband returns and while getting acclimated she seems to let her guard down at the end and takes her menacing husband's word for her sister's death as well as appear to start loving him; she even attends her first annual Bacchae festival.

EB: I think she pretty much resigns herself to “this is what is my life is going to be”. With Tereus, she approaches him with “let’s do this”. He’s her family. Her husband. She wants to be happy with it. She still remains Athenian though which we see in her scene with Itys. She’s asking, “Is this my son?” “I raised him?” She wants him to be a wise King and is very surprised when all he wants is to be a warrior.

JAW: In a sense, Procne's marriage to Tereus silences her. In a time and culture that a woman has no choice over the matter, she has no alternative, but to be silenced. Philomel is also silenced by Tereus in a more physically violent way. What are your feelings on being silenced by men and how have you been able to fight against the norm to have such a considerable voice?

EB: I wasn’t raised around a lot of men. My mother and my mother alone raised me. I never had to experience being in a situation of being silenced by any man. I’ve witnessed it in friends where the relationship isn’t built on equal parts; where they aren’t able to express themselves equally. It’s sad.

JAW: Catherine Maxwell, literary critic and professor at Queen Mary's School of London, writes, "Procne, who has considered the possibility of either blinding or muting her husband realizes he will be punished more clearly by the loss of his son. Itys, described as 'the image of his father', and clearly his substitute as well as his heir, is violently slain and dismembered by the women. When Tereus is informed of his son's death, the wildly disarrayed and blood-bespattered Philomela mutely presents him with Itys' severed head. At one stroke Tereus' male issue and his hopes for futurity are decisively cut off." This final act, of course, is only told in the myth and not the play. I think we'd have to do a film version to have the head of a kid on a platter shown, but this act of "castration" as Maxwell associates, could it almost be seen as an abortive act on Procne's part?

EB: No. She’s actually cutting off the line. He has raped and mutilated her sister and violated their sanctity of marriage. All for the love of his country. He even says it, “I love my country. I love my son.” So, she kills off the line to his great country. Destroying everything. He has no chance of another son. Ultimately, it’s not about Itys. I feel she doesn’t even know him. He wasn’t really been raised by her. Thracian and Athenian childrearing were probably very different.

JAW: Sophocles wrote of this myth that in the end, it is Philomel who turns into a swallow and Procne a nightingale. Later accounts by Ovid and English poet, Keats, write the myth as Wertenbaker's play does where Procne is the swallow and Philomel the nightingale. It seems to me a more tragic ending to put it Sophocles' way, but more dramatic the way The Love of the Nightingale presents it. Thoughts?

EB: Yes. It is more dramatic.

JAW: Wertenbaker is a British playwright, but this story parallels some of my feelings about the shift we are seeing in American culture. Do you think there is an American philosophy or art that could emerge over the shadows of our sports? And how?

EB: I see a lot of parallels between Tereus, and Thrace, with the current state of our country. The male chorus says, “What hasn’t been said and done in the sake of the future.” We hear this is good, this is for the future, but like Tereus there’s never a right justification for what is being done. It’s pure arrogance. In our play, Tereus is the one who takes what he wants. He’s the one who leads people into war. When he decides to rape Philomel, I don’t think he believes there will be consequences to his actions. It’s his realization that he may in fact need to cover his ass, that he needs to cover up his own secrets, which leads him to cut out her tongue. He knows the soldiers will always be there to pat his back. What ever he does. He’s their leader.

JAW: How do you think he sees Procne?

EB: She’s treated no differently. He has no obligations to her. Women are separate.

JAW: Even Thracian women?

EB: Thracian women are not necessarily women who would engage in war. They’re concerned with doom and darkness, but not warriors.

JAW: How does Procne purport the feminist view?

EB: She’s still Athenian and has the belief that women and men are equal then with the arranged marriage, rape, etc. Philomel and Procne become fellow soldiers. The realization that the men and Tereus come to is that we are capable of the same amount of violence. He is threatened that we will come back at him in the end so he hunts us down. And beforehand, he is threatened that Philomel will speak. That we will all speak really.

JAW: Is Timberlake Wertenbaker saying, “Watch out?”

EB: No. I think her purpose is to show the horrors we can inflict on each other and the power to speak up for ourselves.

Barlow certainly has the power and the fury. I apologize for making her get a little political, but know she’s more than happy to answer a question or two about the state of the union. “In rehearsals, it happened as well. I went off on a political tangent and everyone was a little thrown off.” She’s hardcore. Watch out.

Erin Barlow can be seen in LiveWire Chicago Theatre’s production of The Love of the Nightingale which runs through April 29th at the side project theatre (1439West Jarvis Ave.); shows are Thursday – Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2 pm. Tickets are $15 with $12 student and senior discount tickets available as well as $10 industry night seats on Thursday and Sunday with headshot and resume. Call 773.412.8089 for reservations.