H OF H PLAYBOOK

Classicist and poet Carson produces a scrapbooklike rendering of a lesser-known Greek tragedy.

In Herakles, staged in 416 B.C.E., Euripides imagined the demigod returning home to Thebes to find his household under assault by usurper Lykos, who is bent on eliminating the royal house of Amphitryon. As with all tragedies, much of the context is provided by a chorus—here, of old men who, though wise, can’t do much about the situation. With a collagelike text incorporating drawings and sketches, some with splashes of color, Carson works a few plot points of the original, which contains about 1,425 lines as against Carson’s few score. It’s modernized, too; Amphitryon lives in an Airstream, driven from his palace by a “totalitarian cracker.” (It’s not hard to imagine whom Carson might have been thinking of there.) Although they have taken refuge at an altar, Lykos is so irreligious as to plan to burn out Amphitryon, Herakles’ wife, and their kids, “obliged to close our lids / before we’d like.” The chorus invokes V.I. Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat, while Lykos, entering with his goon squad, allows that he’s “a basically / outcomes-oriented guy.” When Herakles—H of H, that is, whose name is explained—arrives, he plangently recalls the labors he’s been set to do, again drawing on Bolshevik history and throwing in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for good measure. Naturally, tragic things ensue; after a spasm of divinely induced madness that causes Herakles to distribute death a little more broadly than he might have wished, all he can say is “Alas” and long for death. Leave it to Theseus, his demidivine pal, to keep him on point: “What could be more useless than you limping offstage to die in a dead language?” Carson’s anachronisms, like those of Christopher Logue, are jarring but suggestive, and the language often attains a nobility worthy of the original tragedians, as when the chorus sings, “We go in tears. / So many swift and dirty years.”

An evocative, artful reimagining of the madness of an ancient hero.