Agamemnon and His Daughters (review)

Agamemnon and His Daughters. Adapted by Kenneth Cavander. Arena Stage, Washington. 15 September 2001.

Agamemnon and His Daughters, like many recent productions including Cavander's (and John Barton's) own The Greeks or Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Atrides, creates a new tetralogy from an assortment of Greek originals: Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, an Electra that draws from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and Euripides' Iphigeneia Among the Taurians. Using Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis as a prologue to Aeschylus brings Iphigeneia's sacrifice alive for the modern audience and humanizes Klytaimestra's later murder of her husband in Agamemnon. So does cutting out most of the first part of Aeschylus' original, which obscures Klytaimestra's powerful rhetoric and increasing tensions with the chorus. Substituting an eclectic Electra for Aeschylus' more ritualistic version of the same myth, The Libation Bearers, further develops a largely realistic and psychologized drama that consistently plays down the politics in favor of domestic tragedy. The resolutions offered for Orestes and Electra's revenge against their mother and her consort Aegisthus in Sophocles, Euripides, and above all in Aeschylus' problematic trial in Eumenides have been criticized as unsatisfactory and ambiguous. Substituting Orestes' rescue of his embittered sister Iphigeneia, who has been saved by the goddess Artemis to become a priestess of human sacrifice in a cult at the far reaches of the Black Sea, permits both restitution to the martyred daughter and a believable psychological release from madness and guilt.

In principle, then, Cavander's new version made sense. His prosaic translation served his aims by being accessible and immediate, if largely devoid of poetic range and complexity. Most mythological references or choral meditations were eliminated in favor of exposition of important well known myths concerning Helen or the disastrous struggle for power between Atreus and Thyestes, which ended in the eating of Thyestes' children. The plays worked best when they were abbreviated versions of the originals, however. The patchwork Electra repeatedly descended into inconsistent characterization and enigmatic shifts in tone. Sophocles' intransigent heroine alternated inexplicably with Euripides' confused and rebellious adolescent; the dignified Klytaimestra of the first two plays became a guilty alcoholic veering from the bad mother of Sophocles and Aeschylus to the regretful and far more maternal and domestic queen of Euripides. The false story of Orestes' death was narrated not by his tutor but by the hero and his friend Pylades, neither of whom gives away the punch line concerning Orestes' demise until the final moment. After this ruthless, almost amused cat and mouse game, Orestes' Aeschylean shift to post-matricidal madness came as an unconvincing surprise. More problematic yet was the new ending created for the whole performance in which a golden goddess Artemis played deux ex machina to a reassembled family, asking us to believe that its bellicose and often insensitive men would at her behest lay down their arms to its women and reunite. The myths dramatized in these plays, in their central concern with proliferating violence and revenge on both a personal and political level, are all too timely at the current moment. This production was better at outlining the problems in the first two plays than in providing even a hint of closure or greater illumination in the final two.

The acting and direction by Molly Smith conformed to the largely realistic mode of the whole production but occasionally reached a level of authority more suggestive of a tragic tradition. Gail Grate's Klytaimestra captured the queen's complex character until forced to play the confused alcoholic in Electra. Ezra Knight played Achilles in a more dignified and less pompous fashion than usual. As Kassandra, Tsidii le Loka, dressed in a brilliant blue oriental costume replete with turban and Turkish slippers, gave an arresting display of madness. Both she, Iphigeneia, and the chorus were particularly strong in singing, and it is a pity that the production could not have followed the originals in including more song and dance. From [Begin Page 145] a verbal perspective...