Jocasta is finally alone with Oedipus, the man she knows at this point only as her husband. She tells him about being abused and impregnated as a 13-year-old by Laius, a much older man who will eventually become her husband and whose mysterious death is at the heart of Sophocles’ tragedy, now revived on Broadway as a “political thriller” (Studio 54, booking to Feb. 8, 2026).

Jocasta’s (Lesley Manville) voice—until this moment brisk and commanding—is suddenly shaky. A horrifying disclosure of a traumatic event is being excavated from the psychological gloam into piercing, wrenching light.

“I was three things: a child myself, the mother of a child, and the lover of a powerful man,” Jocasta says, Manville forcing every word out as if crunching gravel. “That rancid man was a dirty animal an

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