Top Pick! — Electra (Holly Twyford) stands before you, quivering. She wants to explain her brother Orestes (Jay Sullivan), lying motionless as a bag of rags behind her, but she is almost too filled with loathing and regret and rage to do so. She is like a teenager standing before a cop, trying to explain what happened at a party that got tragically out of hand. Her party has gotten tragically out of hand. Her brother has killed her mother, who had killed their father. And before that: the whole history of monstrous depredations – revenge killings, baby eatings – which mark and characterize the doomed house of Atreus, stretching back to her great-great grandfather, Tantalus himself, half man and half god (“tricky percentage, half,” she mutters) who, because of an unfortunate remark at a dinner party for the gods (she won’t tell what it was), now orbits the planet under the shadow of a huge rock, which always threatens to crush him but never does.
To watch Twyford twitch, a micron away from an abyss of despair and madness, is to be reminded – briefly, because you’ll want to get back to the story – of why she received three Helen Hayes nominations this year. Here is her Electra, a woman with some of the god-juice, the Olympian DNA, in her, reacting to this excruciating turn of events just like a human would – just like you or I would, had this happened to us. She utters the devastation with which the play opens as if recounting a bad dream in the hope of waking from it. You will hear it no matter where you sit in Folger’s intimate theater. You will hear it because Euripides and Anne Washburn have conspired to tell an unforgettable story, which Twyford and the rest of the cast deliver with sledgehammer power.
A word about the story: although Washburn thoroughly reworks the text to bring out its wit and to make the references clearer to a modern audience, she remains faithful to the familiar bones of the story. Menelaus (Chris Genebach) sought to bring his wife, Helen (Genebach), back from Troy, and so enlisted his dear friend and brother-in-law Agamemnon, King of Argos, to lead a fighting force there. For ten long years Agamemnon spent the blood and treasure of his land, sacrificing his own daughter to the needs of war and blighting the lives of the citizens of Argos. Finally, Helen returns home safe and Menelaus rich, but for Agamemnon, whose murderous wife Clytemnestra has taken a lover, there is only a sword. Orestes, enraged by his mother’s bestial act and urged on, he claims, by Apollo (a recorded Lynn Redgrave), revenged his father. Now the people of Argos are calling for his death, and that of his sister.
Orestes tries to call on the protection of Menelaus, without success. So he goes with his best friend Pylades (Genebach) to confront the Argosian mob. Swayed by some smooth talker obviously in the employ of Clytemnestra’s dad Tyndareus (Twyford), the mob chooses death for Orestes and Electra. The condemned siblings, full of terror and mad vengeance, hatch a terrible murder-and-kidnap plot with Pylades. But at the moment of climactic bloodshed, Apollo himself intervenes, coolly claiming responsibility for Clytemnestra’s murder and clinically explaining, without regard for human feelings, the motivations behind all of the great tragedies of the day.
Even the best of the ancient Greek plays are sometimes heavy slogging for modern audiences. In Orestes, for example, it is impossible not to notice that virtually all of the action takes place either before the play starts or offstage, and that what we see is principally the characters telling the story. But what characters! And what a story! It is the kind of story we begged our parents to tell us before we went to bed, and which thereafter kept us up all night.
Washburn, channeling Euripides, and director Aaron Posner collaborate on some of the best storytelling in Washington, aided by stunning performances from Twyford as an Electra made sick with understanding; Sullivan as an Orestes who seems at first an appealing Apollonian boy-toy but who comes to wear the blood of others as comfortably as an old tunic, and Genebach, who inhabits four characters (he also plays a craven Trojan slave, who acts exactly as you or I would in his situation) so completely different that you will need to consult your program to understand that one actor plays all four characters, and you will still be surprised.
They are aided by a fabulous Greek chorus (Lauren Culpepper, Rebecca Hart, Marissa Molnar, Margo Seibert, and Rachel Zampelli), singing James Sugg’s astonishing score. The question of how to use the Greek chorus in a modern staging is always a matter of some debate, but Sugg and Posner evince no uncertainty: the chorus is like the musical portion of the high mass, expressing emotions too profound to leave to plain unmusical language. While it seems unfair to single anyone out in a chorus this good, Hart sings as though she has the god DNA herself.
Finally, the unobtrusive technical support – Daniel Conway’s towering set, Jessica Ford’s costume design and Tyler Micoleau’s lighting design – contributes significantly to the production’s organic wholeness.
The challenge facing Washburn and Posner was to make the murderous Greeks, who blamed their self-made troubles on their gods, comprehensible to modern Americans. They have succeeded. The foibles of these troubled people, our fathers and mothers a hundred generations ago, are our foibles. And what was Tantalus’ crime, the one Electra didn’t describe, the one that launched all these miseries? There are many stories, but no one seems to know for sure. It is much the same with us.
Orestes, A Tragic Romp
A DCTS TOP PICK!
By Euripides
Adapted by Anne Washburn
Directed by Aaron Posner
Produced by Folger Theatre
Reviewed by Tim Treanor
Orestes, A Tragic Romp runs thru March 7, 2010.
Click here for details, directions and tickets.
ORESTES, A TRAGIC ROMP
- Paul Harris . Variety
- Bob Mondello . City Paper
- Tom Avila . MetroWeekly
- Missy Frederick . DCist
- Peter Marks . The Post
Faiga Levine . Just Theater
Inference is not your strong suit. Cheers!
No, I’m good. I just think if you’re gonna call make a personal attack on someone’s intelligence and motive over what reads as perfectly reasonable criticism, you should have the balls to do it to their face. Kudos!
So Michael… do you ever make posts under a pseudonym. lol What brings you so randomly to these posts after a year? I use a pseudonym only because I am not a raging egomaniac and am merely an interested party. You use your actual name so, what- you can post under other names from time to time and no one thinks it’s you? Who knows, and who really cares. I am just calling a moron a moron.
-Mathias Mainz
P.S. now that you have my name, does that mean we should walk our ten paces? now that I’ve “come out from behind my pseudonym”? does this help you? does this “pick the fight” I’m “obviously raring to have”? Or does it finally end our tete a tete?
If you know him, why not come out from behind your pseudonym and pick the fight you’re obviously raring to have?
I’m not being rude to you. I’m laughing at your unwitting hypocrisy. I find iggy’s comments toward the male players belittling (e.g. facetious and rude with “Please enjoy the show for the women, but I hope the men are more entertaining on the night you go”) and bizarre (i.e. talk about a minority point of view) and have opined to make this clear. Why is my theoretical scenario bizarre? Perhaps I know who iggy is, thereby giving me more insight into their motives and thus informing my opinion to label him a moron. Also, perhaps you should unpin your morality badge and retire from policing comments and giving quasi-lectures on the nature of art and implication. There- that was rude.
Oh not at all, you’re entitled to say whatever you wish too, and I guess you’re entitled to be as rude as you want to be while doing it. I just can’t justify calling someone a moron or personally belittling them, much less postulating some bizarre conspiracy theory, for stating their opinion about a piece of theater. That’s all I was implying.
So basically iggy can purport his “opinion” that the men in that show were not good (despite the overwhelming majority of people/reviews that differ from said “opinion” including mine- guess they were all wrong though), but I must endure an IMPLIED lesson from you about not sharing my “opinion” that iggy is a moron as well as the more blatant profession that “art is subjective” (thanks for letting me know that, btw)? How entirely hypocritical that seems. I’ll maintain my original postulate that “iggy” had ulterior motives behind the post while iterating my “opinion” that he is a moron. Thanks, Michael Glenn.
Art is entirely subjective. One man’s genius is another man’s crap. And the Helen Hayes nominations is no more a validation of quality than a critic’s rave or the praise of a patron in the lobby. So, fecunddisbelief, you may think Iggythegnome is a moron, but he’s not. He has an opinion, and it’s absolutely valid. And so is yours. There’s plenty of room in this world for both outlooks.
Even though this was a year ago, I just HAVE to say this on the evening the HH noms have come out. iggythegnome=moron The men were weak? That’s laughable and I would wager the poster knew this to be false. One of the men played 4 characters with such variance of voice and movement I had to look at my program to see if there was another actor and the guy playing Orestes had an IMMENSE amount of passion and ferocity. I saw the show three times!!! Sounds like someone was just trying to stir up some negative feeling. Shame on you, iggy. Fail. lol
The choice of Deus ex machina was awful. Poor directorial choice.
I saw the show this past Tuesday and absolutely loved the Chorus!! All the women of the Chorus stood out at different times but really it was their power, beauty and harmony as a group that made this an awesome experience for me. I would return to the show to see their performances again. I would also enjoy seeing Holly again. She was wonderful! So much detail and commitment. But I must say I disagree with the critic about the other actors. I thought the men were pretty weak and did not make bold enough or engaging enough choices of movement and voice for their characters. Orestes, although raging by the end, did not convince me that he was tormented by furies or the three fates at the beginning of the show. There just wasn’t enough depth to Orestes, nor Menelaus, in my opinion. So please, see this show for the women, but I hope the men are more enjoyable on the night you go.
I am anxious to see this production. Euripides’ ORESTES has long been a favorite play of mine, very popular in its own day, and I suspect most of the credit for the script should be his, however bright Washburn may be.