Rogue’s Oresteia
Poor judgment saturates the conceptually promising event; the plays, performed in repertory, are so stylistically and thematically disparate that they hardly inform or build off one another. And who can trust a company that justifies Iphigenia at Aulis, a sort of prequel to the original “Oresteia,” by asserting, “We couldn’t find a version of Agamemnon that we all thought was great.”
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Director and translator Stephen Fedo has a better handle on Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, a seminal retelling of the Greek myth originally staged in Berlin by Max Reinhardt in 1903. Klytaemnestra and her new husband, King Aegisthus (who plotted with his wife to murder Agamemnon), are holed up in a Victorian castle populated by phantomlike washerwomen and menservants, as well as Klytaemnestra’s two surviving daughters, Elektra and Chrysothemis. Rotting from guilt over her vengeful murder of Agamemnon, Klytaemnestra haunts the halls in a desperate search for sleep, something she believes her mystical daughter Elektra can provide. But Elektra spends her days plotting to kill her mother as payback for her father’s death and hopes that her long-lost brother Orestes will show up to help execute her plot. When he arrives in disguise, Hofmannsthal lets loose a wholly modern family revenge tragedy, without need of gods, fate, or appeals to militaristic chauvinism.
Where: Athenaeum Theatre, first-floor studio, 2936 N. Southport
