“I simply ask questions,” Socrates (Michael Stuhlbarg) says with what might be described as either humility or false humility in Tim Blake Nelson’s Socrates. Insisting on his simple mission, he’s announcing what we’ve come to know as the Socratic Method of teaching: not offering information outright but questioning, with the goal of extracting knowledge as if it’s already grasped by the person being questioned.
Watching Socrates repeatedly apply his method during Nelson’s first act swiftly becomes polemical. (“Gadfly” is a noun frequently flung at someone behaving with such insistence.) But rarely have polemics in a drama been so commanding. Nelson’s play is instantly one of the very best in a season unusually blessed with top-drawer entries.
To be sure, through the first act, Socrates isn’t easy. Since the fifth-century philosopher is something of an inveterate contrarian, he’s happy, even eager, to badger those he’s questioning about what they know, what they don’t know, what they think they know and what they think they don’t know. His attacks are unrelenting and often circuitous.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
Socrates goes after one and all with such fervor that—following an opening scene between Plato (Teagle F. Bougere) and a boy whom he’s preparing to take over his mission as Socrates’ messenger to the world—Nelson introduces a sequence that’s like an Athenian roast of the unforgiving philosopher.
The scene, where no less a participant than Aristophanes (Tom Nelis) is on hand, is the kick-off to the presentation of a man who—while maintaining he knows nothing and therefore can teach nothing—is not only increasingly familiar to all Athenians but getting on their nerves to the point where he will be tried (and of course convicted) as an enemy of the people.
By the way, the term “enemy of the people,” which comes to mind, resonates with louche oval-office language regularly heard nowadays. “Democracy” and what it is, as well as democracy under siege, is another subject that playwright Nelson deliberately moots—without offering conclusions—throughout this work. He’s vigorously promoting its relevance to today—“A democracy divided,” Socrates calls it at one urgent moment in a phrase that certainly sounds familiar.
Socrates applying his method dominates Nelson’s first act such that some audiences may well be fascinated by him. Others may decide they’ve gotten the thrust and are ready for him to move on. The mood is slightly altered by the appearance of Socrates’ snappish wife Xanthippe (Miriam A. Hyman) as well as by his trial for impious behavior and deleterious influence on the young. Nelson depicts that episode up to the acting-ending moment when, after Socrates delivers his self-defense, the jury goes out.
For his second act, Nelson does some deft gear-shifting. Though Socrates hardly gives over this dyed-on-the-DNA need to question everything but his own brand of communication, the act begins with his receiving the death sentence and then proceeds to its subsequent execution.
Although the ensuing dramatic moods aren’t exactly mellow, they are to some impressive extent elegiac. Despite those around Socrates importuning him to accede to fleeing outright or settling on another way to avoid death, Socrates holds to his sentencing. As history attests, nothing dissuades him, not even Xanthippe’s pleading for him to think of her and their three sons, one an infant. (They’re younger than might be expected of a man now 70). Even when she points out that she’s virtually penniless as a result of his not accepting remuneration for his teaching (he steadfastly denies being a teacher), he refuses to change his mind.
Ultimately, Socrates, surrounded by those who’ve failed to dissuade him, dies his noble but not so dignified death, having quaffed the cup of hemlock. (“Hemlock” isn’t mentioned here, only “poison” mixed with opium to lessen the painful effects).
By the way, Scott Pask has looked closely at Jacques-Louis David’s 1787 neoclassical painting, “The Death of Socrates” to create his set. He’s extended the somber environment along the auditorium walls, where the democracy-infused Greek text of a funeral oration by Pericles, as Thucydides recorded it, continues from the upstage wall where it begins. Note that David’s scene—now hanging in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—is a dignified representation of the death scene, whereas Nelson doesn’t back away from the harrowing hemlock-induced death throes that follow.
Neither do Stuhlbarg nor director Doug Hughes duck the shocking sight. Hughes—who sometimes looks to have taken on perhaps more overlapping assignments than may be wise—is hotly on his game here. Given the way in which he has situated his cast members, he, too, might have been thinking about the David canvas.
As for Stuhlbarg, his performance of Socrates’s death is one of the most convincingly memorable as any experienced on a stage in some time. Maybe ever. In a riveting sequence just before that, he roughly bathes himself, as apparently Socrates did before downing the fatal brew.
So bearded and back on stage in Catherine Zuber’s downscale toga-like get-up, Stuhlbarg returns triumphantly. He forsook local boards a few years back for the screen. (In 2017, he had the distinction of appearing in three of the films nominated for the best picture Oscar: The Post, the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water, and Call Me By Your Name.) Hardly ever not in focus, he’s required to be heatedly rhetorical for about two hours and 40 minutes. He meets all requirements, bringing unending nuance to Socrates’ high-decibel arguments.
As Plato, Bougere is commanding and with just the right hint of arrogance. Along the way he has good fun with a line about Socrates’ actually having had very few ideas. (Nelson does work in a sly hint at Plato’s “Myth of the Cave.”) The rest of the cast members—lighted by Tyler Micoleau with Mark Bennett’s sound and well-placed original music—do yeoman-like jobs at doubling and tripling.
Whenever we think nowadays, and possibly for a few millennia, about the Greeks birthing democracy, we’re likely to imagine Athens as one of those marvelous cities on a hill. Nelson depicts a democratic state as often contentious, as frequently at risk of foundering, as a political cauldron. In other words, he’s set out to unleash a play for our time—and succeeded.
Socrates opened April 16, 2019, at the Public Theater and runs through June 2. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
