Two Theatres Return to their Root

Last Planet Theatre (in San Francisco) has just finished a run of an adaptation of Racine's Phedre, reviewed at sfweekly.com:

Playwright Matthew Maguire's modernized version of Racine's neoclassical tragedy Phèdre is set in the aftermath of an acrimonious business merger. The drama tells the story of Faye, the wife of a high-powered CEO, whose illicit desire for her stepson leads to all-round misery and destruction. Maguire's text sweats and grunts with seedy descriptions of intercourse, scenes in which characters dry-hump chairs, and slatherings of pseudo-orgasmic poetry. Yet for a play about sex, it's curiously sexless. There's just not much passion -- at least of the sexual variety -- in a corporate takeover. Half the play reads like a soap opera; the other half like the ersatz "poetry" one creates out of little magnetized words on fridge doors. I admire Last Planet for its boldness and intelligence; if any local company has demonstrated an understanding of human desire, it's this one.

And Perth Theatre (Australia) has Ted Hughes' adaptation of Racine on its 2006 lineup.