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Pitch imperfect: Yale Drama School's Phedre.

Watching the Yale Drama School's production of Racine's Phèdre, I was reminded of Alan Alda in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. As a fatuous "comic genius," he points out how funny the situation of Oedipus Rex is: "Someone here has committed a crime — oh, wait, it's me!" He's meant to be a jerk, but he has a point. You can find comedy in tragedy if you've a mind to — particularly if what's tragic in the story seems too remote from your own point of reference.

We might reimagine Phèdre, generally considered one of the world's great tragedies, as a comedy. Is that what director Christopher Mirto and his cast had in mind? I'm not sure. Certainly some of the members of the audience the night I attended found cause to laugh — and my impression is they felt they were laughing with the play, not at it.

So either it was played for laughs, or their response was completely inappropriate. I would say the latter if we were dealing with Racine's play, written in French in the 17th century, and fraught with characters enacting passionate situations controlled by very precise formal expression. Mirto's production used a modern translation by Ted Hughes, a poet not known for his comic touch. And yet his language here rarely gripped the ear.

With such language, perhaps the difference between comedy and tragedy is one of emphasis.

Certainly the play's events were as unbelievable to Racine's audience as they are to us. Phaedra, married to King Theseus, falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, son of Theseus by the Amazon Hippolyta. Her love is killing her physically — it's adultery and incest. But there's also the fact that Hippolytus is known as the chastest of the chaste, spurning any interest in womankind.

But as we learn first, Hippolytus is actually in love for the first time in his life: He's enamored of Aricia, a woman taken captive by Theseus after vanquishing her kinsmen, and forbidden to him. So he wants to leave his father's court and go abroad. But he doesn't do this before Phaedra declares her desperate passion. Spurned, and with Theseus (missing and presumed dead) returned, Phaedra lets her devoted handmaid Oenone convince her to accuse Hippolytus of rape. So Theseus, who has the ear of the god Poseidon, curses his son, demanding the god exterminate him.

Granted, there's a certain absurdity to all this if you don't believe in fatal passion. So how to play it so that a contemporary audience, with a sense of romantic reality that has little to do with fate or lineage, won't snicker and giggle?

I don't know the answer. Neither did this production. A notable exception was Austin Durant, as Theseus. Here was an actor speaking in the tones of a character in a tragedy. None of that "I cursed my son, oops, my bad, he was innocent" delivery for him. But he came to seem the heavy in a bit of fluff that had to do with how to get over a schoolgirl crush and get back at that boy who was always making eyes at that chick you can't stand.

Might such a Phèdre work? If done deliberately, it might be wildly enjoyable. But I'm not convinced that was anyone's intention here. Rather, this production had no sense of how to pitch the play to deliver the necessary pathos. When Phèdre whines, rather than assaulting the audience with extreme griefs, we have deracinated Racine.