""You look at all these people who are running the world, it's a bunch of fucking weirdos," he said outside the building. "What is that about? I wanted to play Oedipus as close to me as possible.""
""We had various bad names," he said: the Destroyers, Toxoid, Private Party. "We thought it was hilarious that you'd have posters outside your gig saying 'Private Party.' We hadn't really factored in the idea that people then might not come.""
A new Broadway retelling stages Oedipus as a politician awaiting Election Night, using a visible onstage countdown to the play's inevitable revelation. The production casts Mark Strong as a modern, ambitious politician with idealistic, narcissistic, and opportunistic traits without modeling him on any single public figure. Strong connects his portrayal to personal experience and backgrounds, including an English upbringing, an Austrian mother, an absent Italian father, and time at a Norfolk boarding school. He discovered punk rock as a youth, fronted bands with playful names, and brought those rebellious textures into his life and performance. Strong visited Federal Hall to consider power, the Greeks, and time before a performance.
Read at The New Yorker
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