The Oresteia by Ellen McLaughlin (review)

Michael Kahn staged an absorbing production of The Oresteia to conclude his thirty-three-year tenure as artistic director of Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. An intuitive and imaginative educator, administrator, and interpreter of classical texts from the Western theatrical canon, Kahn has displayed a remarkable facility for surfacing fresh resonances in works that have captivated and challenged audiences across multiple centuries—from The Oedipus Plays to Corneille’s The Liar—throughout his career. His production of The Oresteia was a close collaboration with actor and playwright Ellen McLaughlin, who freely adapted Aeschylus’s epic trilogy, condensing the original’s three plays—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides—into a two-hour-and-twenty-minute event. The performance at once activated debate about the meanings of justice and the possibilities of democracy. It also invited reflection on the ways we might continue to mobilize hope and embody compassion in a moment marked by immense violence, despair, and cruelty.

Among the production’s most impactful innovations was the decision to dramatize Agamemnon’s (a stately Kelcey Watson) sacrificial murder of Iphigenia (Simone Warren), one of the two children he shares with Clytemnestra (Kelley Curran), in the first act. Agonizingly plotted in Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, the catalytic event precedes the action of Aeschylus’s tragedy by ten years. Incorporating this backstory into the drama, which was presented in a highly ritualized scene that kept the filicidal act offstage, not only granted greater context for the anguish and rage that Clytemnestra negotiates while awaiting her husband’s return home after many years at war but also served to clarify the motivations behind her choice to murder the king. While the consensus among the chorus—portrayed here by a markedly diverse ensemble of eight performers, several with long histories of collaborating with Kahn, including Helen Carey and the formidable Franchelle Stewart Dorn—is that Agamemnon, who returns home with a concubine, Cassandra (Zoë Sophia Garcia), in tow, is a hero, Clytemnestra comes to view him as a thief, one who robs her of time, love, intimacy, and, notably, the tenderness of her beloved daughter. By offering flashes of the deep affection shared between mother and child, movingly portrayed by Curran and Warren, the production revealed just how much had been stolen from the aggrieved queen. Kahn’s shrewd direction also made palpable the misery and suffering fueling her

Kelley Curran (Clytemnestra) and Simone Warren (Iphigenia) in The Oresteia. (Photo: Scott Suchman.)

The cast of The Oresteia. (Photo: Scott Suchman.)

desire to seek revenge, thereby endowing the character and, indeed, the adaptation with additional heft and complexity.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Aeschylus’s rendering of the tragedy that befalls the House of Atreus in The Oresteia, the only extant ancient Greek trilogy, are the powerful insights it offers about the human capacity for brutality. Kahn’s production illuminated just how relevant these insights remain, using the second act’s focus on the murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes (Josiah Bania) to draw attention to the ways that acts of violence inevitably beget more acts of violence and, in the process, yield additional tragedies. Much like his mother, Orestes patiently waits for an opportunity to carry out his homicidal deed. With the encouragement and endorsement of his sister Electra (Rad Pereira), he commits what he believes is a justified and necessary act of revenge for his father’s killing. Bania and Pereira brought tremendous humanity to their respective roles, surfacing the siblings’ various ambivalences. Curran, who commanded attention anytime she appeared on stage, matched their intensity and dynamism, which added to the tragedy of Clytemnestra’s demise.

If, in the first two acts, characters wrestled with questions of justice somewhat obliquely, the third act witnessed them taking them on more directly. It was this act that best exemplified the thoughtfulness of McLaughlin’s...