Oedipus and the ‘Christianisation’ of the Oedipus at Colonus in Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s The Gospel at Colonus

This paper deals with one of the most famous rewritings of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, the Gospel at Colonus by Lee Breuer and Bob Telson, first performed in 1983. This will be a two-stage discussion. In the first part, a close analysis and comparison between some relevant parts of Sophocles’s text and Breuer’s one will be proposed to show the different strategies adopted by the modern playwright to ‘accommodate’ the original pagan text into the totally new Christian-Pentecostal context staged. It will be argued that in the second part of the play the Christian afflatus of the rewriting intensifies, ultimately conveying Breuer and Telson’s final message of a possible conciliation between white and Black, paganism and Pentecostal Christianity. The second part will take a closer look at the figure of Oedipus and at his radical change from his past pagan condition to the newly obtained Christian power: from a vulnerable wanderer in search of a place to die in and have his sins forgiven to a symbolic redeemer of all humanity and dispenser of joy and hope for all the people gathered in the Pentecostal church and beyond.