“This World of Tomorrow” and “Oedipus” Dramatize the Power of the Past

To write “Tomorrow,” Hanks and Glossman adapted several of Hanks’s own short stories, primarily “The Past Is Important to Us,” which he had long hoped might become a movie. Much of the trouble stems from confusion about how a stage text needs to differ from a screenplay—in the number of locations, the allocation of secondary characters, and so on. And, frankly, Bert just isn’t a good enough part for Hanks. Ever since my afternoon at the Shed, I’ve been mentally casting him elsewhere. We should see his Stage Manager in “Our Town.” Or his Willy Loman.

I do recommend that short story, though, which provides some insight into the odd disjunctions of “Tomorrow.” It makes clear that billionaire Bert is a billionaire cad and that he’s concealing the reason for his trips from Cyndee—in the story, she’s his wife, the “fourth and youngest.” Bert’s sudden interest in Carmen seems like an intoxication with a shiny new thing, mirrored by the way the World’s Fair actually operates as a pageant of commodities. In casting the palpably lovable and decent Hanks, the team had to pivot to a Bert who’s also lovable and decent, but a whiff of that selfish ur-Bert from the story remains. “Their Future then was better than our Present is right now,” Bert tells M-Dash, which is a heck of a thing to say about people in 1939. But Bert’s got a girl to woo, and so the world—this poor, poor world—will have to take care of itself.

There’s something almost Oedipal about the devotion that certain men have to women from the past. Is it notable that Bert is falling in love with a woman of a previous generation? What an undemanding fantasy Carmen is: an old-fashioned Greatest Generation stoic who’s also young and has never heard of women’s lib. What would Freud say about such a relationship? It’s a puzzle. How lucky, then, that we can consult the mother of all such May-December romances, now that this fall’s biggest transfer from the West End has arrived at Studio 54.

In Robert Icke’s crackling “Oedipus,” the director’s rewrite of Sophocles’ great tragedy, the bones remain the same: a prophecy tells Oedipus (Mark Strong), who seems to be a man of nearly boundless good fortune, that he has unknowingly killed his father and slept with his mother. In Icke’s modern version, Oedipus is a candidate on Election Night, on tenterhooks as promising results pour in. Throughout, Icke ramps up the erotic energy between Oedipus and his queen—here political wife—Jocasta (Lesley Manville), even a little past the point of the romance-killing revelation that she’s his mum. (You can buy merch in the lobby that says “Truth Is a Motherfucker,” in case you were worrying about spoilers.)

Oedipus’ nox horribilis takes place in his campaign headquarters—a series of impersonal white conference rooms designed by Hildegard Bechtler—as black-clad movers clean it out for the next tenant. (Icke draws attention to tragedy’s cyclical nature; every ending is a beginning is an ending.) As the stage empties, Oedipus’ family gathers to take his mind off the ballot returns: his wife makes jokes about being roughly thirteen years older than he is; his daughter Antigone (Olivia Reis) brings her college-philosophy textbook with her, and she and her uncle Creon (John Carroll Lynch) discuss the riddle of the Sphinx; and Oedipus’ apparent mother, Merope (a stunning Anne Reid), keeps badgering him for a word, worried about his last-minute campaign promise to reveal his birth certificate.

Meanwhile, a countdown clock in the background ticks toward the instant when the votes will be tabulated. In a marvellous bit of directorial peacocking, at the precise moment the clock hits 00:00:00, Oedipus finally learns everything he needs to know.

Strong, whose big-hearted Oedipus flashes into aggrieved petulance whenever he meets with even the slightest opposition, tightens his jaw to the cracking point, and this ought to be foreshadowing enough. But Icke cannot stop himself from alerting us to his script’s cleverness by including a host of double entendres—“You’ll be the death of me,” Jocasta says, looking up at her husband adoringly—and flirting with the border between horror and farce. Icke’s sensibility is defiantly icky: he has the accidentally incestuous couple fondle and kiss and fumble in each other’s underwear. He does, though, eventually redirect the night back toward a more sincerely felt atmosphere of tragedy, handing an eleventh-hour monologue to Manville, who gives a long speech about a past that Jocasta hoped to have buried with a certain baby. Icke destabilizes the old Sophoclean calculus: what happened to Jocasta as a thirteen-year-old far surpasses anything that Oedipus will suffer. But, of course, it’s his name up there on the marquee. Mothers never get the credit they deserve. ♦