O.J. Trial’s Grip: Elements of Classic Tragedy : Commentary: To a theater critic, the Simpson case plays out much like a Greek or Shakespearean play.

It has been almost a year since the murders on Bundy. We’ve grown used to, maybe even looked forward to, the jokes on Leno and Letterman every night, as if humor might dilute the horror of the crime. But parody remains stubbornly irrelevant to this trial, though not because its story lacks humor. Take Kato Kaelin, please--nobody has been the butt of so many IQ jokes since Dan Quayle. Still, no impersonation of Kato can hold a candle to the real, on-stand Kato, calmly applying lip balm while listening absently to one of Marcia Clark’s questions.

The primary reason that parody seems irrelevant is that this trial is the very stuff of tragedy--epic, archetypal tragedy. It has an air of inevitability while remaining continually unpredictable, the paradox of any great tragedy, be it “Hamlet” or “Medea.” That is why viewers, myself among them, return day after day. As a theater critic who has suffered through many seemingly endless dramas wishing I could walk out, I find that this is one I need to keep watching.

While we addicts might enjoy Kato just as we enjoy the Fool in “King Lear,” it is the tragedy that keeps us tuned in. We continue to watch, even after the past three interminable weeks during which it began to appear there might in fact be a conspiracy afoot--that Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld were actually plotting to bore the jury to death. The trial has begun to resemble something by Samuel Beckett, with millions of viewers thinking, “I can’t watch on; I’ll watch on.”

We addicts stay with it, even as the bombing in Oklahoma City wipes everything else off the front page. Oklahoma City is a tragedy on a larger scale perhaps, but it is one without a tragic hero. The perpetrators, no matter how many stories journalists uncover from their unhappy childhoods, will remain freaks, oddities, weird outsiders. Like natural disasters, they may have tragic consequences, but they are not the stuff of drama. For those who believe him innocent and for those who believe he is guilty, O.J. Simpson is a tragic hero. Like Agamemnon or Oedipus the King, he has fallen from a great height.

Depending on whether you believe the defendant innocent or guilty, the Simpson trial is either a Kafkaesque drama of wrongful accusation, with the innocent man beset by legions, or a more classic, Sophoclean tale of hubris exposed. In Greek tragedy, the audience already knows the story; the drama lies in waiting for the moment when the inescapability of the hero’s fate dawns on him. We never wonder who killed Oedipus’ father--we wonder what it will mean for him to come to awareness. Those who assume O.J. is guilty monitor every event in the trial that might force the defendant to reveal complicity. When he sees the bloody glove, will he crack?

Or, for that matter, will someone else crack, and provide instead a Perry Mason moment? Under heated cross-examination, perhaps Mark Fuhrman will one day say, “OK, OK, I did it!”

Aristotle wrote that tragic drama’s main source of pleasure and instruction comes from the hero’s recognition of his own complicity in his fate. In the saga of O.J., Ron Shipp brought us breathlessly close to such a moment. Shipp was the former friend who testified that on the night after the murder, O.J. asked him for information on how DNA testing works. O.J.’s lawyers painted Shipp as a drunk and an opportunist. Shipp looked past the lawyers and directly at his old friend and said, “That is sad, O.J. . . . really sad.”

But no, the defendant was stone-faced. So we continue to wait, with grave vigilance, through the long, dog days of blood evidence.

No wonder Judge Ito almost had a mutiny on his hands. When the trial shifted its attention from the lives of people who knew the victims to the competency of the criminologists, the jury spent hours watching videotape of Andrea Mazzola applying tweezers to little pieces of paper and then had to listen to Neufeld crow triumphantly, “You picked up the chem wipe with the same hand you’ve been resting on the dirty concrete! Is that right?”

Charged with making decisions about guilt and fate, the jury becomes the Greek chorus who watches, who understands, who senses what is coming, but who, at this rate, may never be able to chant its verdict.

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We trial addicts know that much of the country clucks its tongue disapprovingly over how, well, low-brow, our obsession seems. In Georgia, a small-town newspaper made national news with its decision to ban all O.J. coverage. (Of course that decision only provided ABC’s “World News Tonight” with yet another O.J. story.)

Sure, there’s too much commentary, a comic overabundance. I understand how people get disgusted with the so-called legal experts, the second tier of commentary pointing out the faults in the first tier of commentary. Let them bay and moralize. No one can talk me out of watching the trial.

Why would I stop? Whether it’s closer some days to Grisham, Shakespeare, Aeschylus or an episode of “Lassie,” the trial seems guided by a literary sensibility. The complicated and often moving symbols are there, if you want to find them. In his testimony, Sukru Boztepe painted a picture of Nicole’s Akita, only living witness to the slaying. The dog howled plaintively; it walked agitated through the streets, its paws awash in its mistress’ blood.

The Akita took Boztepe to the murder scene; it gazed down the walkway where the bodies lay. The animal is tragically linked to its dead mistress because, like Nicole, it can’t tell us what happened. Named Kato, the dog seemed both more eloquent and haunted than its namesake, who does have the power of speech.

When he finished his testimony, Kaelin held a press conference. At some point, his lawyer stepped forward to admonish the reporters, with whom his client had moments before been sending flirtatious sidelong glances, as is his wont. The lawyer, William Genego, was stern with the press: “You have lost the sense of this as real life and you view it as theater.” He was perhaps the wrong person to be delivering this message. His client, after all, appeared remarkably untraumatized. But Genego continued: “This isn’t theater. It isn’t drama. This is real-life experience for the people going through it.”

One, however, does not preclude the other.