Imagine it: Argos, one island of many in the Peloponnese region of Greece. In the dim evening a lone watchman, fighting off bad dreams, sees a beacon light from the East: a fair omen indicating the final, happy fall of Troy. The Greek war against its neighbor has raged for 10 years, and this night it’s finally over.
It means, on a broader scale, an end to the endless and omen-speckled Trojan War for the many kingdoms of Greece. More importantly for the watchman, though, it means the return of the king of Argos, Agamemnon. Happy fire, indeed, the watchman must think. The king may return from the nightmare of blood and death, back to his wife, Clytemnestra, and his children.
What the watchman doesn’t know is that, as a result of this return, the queen Clytemnestra will murder her husband for killing their daughter, and will herself be killed by their son, Orestes, in retribution. Clearly, the watchman doesn’t realize he’s in a Greek tragedy.
This is how The Oresteia begins, the name given to a trio of plays written by the playwright Aeschylus in the 5th century BCE: Agamemnon, Choephoroe (translated as The Libation Bearers), and Eumenides (The Happy Ones). Set in Greece’s mythic past, these three plays catalog the murder of Agamemnon by his wife for his ritual sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia; the murder of Clytemnestra by their son Orestes; his subsequent torture by the supernatural Furies; a divine courtroom drama; and eventually, a catharsis resulting in the freedom of Orestes and the birth of Athenian democracy. With all its Hellenistic anxieties, Bronze-Age superstition, and family histories (not to mention weird names for today’s ear), The Oresteia is certainly no easy thing to modernize for a 21st-century audience.
Yet, on Feb. 16, Baltimore’s Chesapeake Shakespeare Company did just that, dredging forth the 2500-year-old bad dream for a modern audience to experience firsthand. Better yet, on opening night, CSC proved with their adaptation that The Oresteia is full of just as much life (and death) today as 2500 years ago.
The Oresteia is the first Greek tragedy the company has ever put on, which raises the question: why this one? Why not the wildly popular Oedipus Rex, or Aeschylus’s other chart-topper, Prometheus Bound?
It’s difficult to answer simply, and to do so, it may pay to know a bit about the play itself. The Oresteia is the only complete and extant cycle of Greek tragedy that we possess – that is, three complete plays telling one complete story. This is certainly no small factor in the CSC’s decision, but “completeness” is far from the only concern here.
Underneath the blood and the bone of its plot, The Oresteia is, essentially, about two things: the cyclical nature of revenge, and the importance of democracy. These ideas are inextricable from the story itself, lending it quite a bit of staying power even two millenia out. Agamemnon had a reason for sacrificing his daughter, Iphigeneia. It was a murder ordained by the Gods themselves, according to Agamemnon’s prophets, and without it the Greeks were apparently doomed to fail at Troy. Even still, the crime deserves some form of retribution, and depending on who you ask, Clytemnestra may well have been right in killing her husband. Yet, after Clytemnestra’s brutal killing of both her husband and his innocent slave girl Cassandra, who could blame Orestes (or his sister, Elektra) for the desire to avenge the murdered father? And at the same time, where is the justification in killing a mother merely for avenging the slaughter of her child?
The Oresteia gives few easy answers, but by the end of the play, there is at least one clear solution: democracy, with all the difficulties that it entails. It’s through democracy, the impartial assessment of Orestes’s crimes by a jury of his Athenian peers (and maybe a God or two thrown in for kicks), that he eventually wins his freedom from the torture of the Furies. In this way, The Oresteia is not just a bloody record of one family’s self-destruction, but in fact an etiology on the birth of democracy. By the end, Athena and Apollo have installed a new status quo for all mankind, a way to break out from its murderous and shadowy past.
Aeschylus, himself an Athenian, would have thought quite highly of democracy’s ability to mete and dole dispassioned, collective justice. This preoccupation with the democratic vision as an anodyne for our cycles of violence has kept The Oresteia very much alive in the popular consciousness. For any production of the play to be successful – regardless of time period – it would have to make these themes shine through for its audience.
And indeed, much of why the CSC production succeeds may be found in its focus on democracy and community. So important are these ideas to this production, in fact, that they bring them to the minds of theatergoers before the play can even start. On the first page of the playbill, an essay by this adaptation’s playwright, Ellen McLaughlin, reminds the audience of the philosophy underpinning the horror of what they are soon to see.
“The Oresteia is about how a people moves on after having seen the worst human beings are capable of,” writes McLaughlin. “People in the past have sometimes recovered the best of human nature, even when they thought it had been lost forever.”
Keeping with this theme, the CSC’s Oresteia shows us both the best and the worst of humanity, often in the same people. While the original Aeschylus certainly suggests empathy for its cast – as an example, Agamemnon initially agonizes over the “heavy doom” he faces in being asked to kill his young daughter – sympathy is essential in the CSC’s Oresteia.
Clytemnestra (Isabelle Anderson), too often portrayed as some kind of Argive “proto-Lady-Macbeth,” is instead a harrowed, miserable woman, hiding her sorrows behind laconic quips. She begins the play complaining to the housekeeper chorus (Gabriel Alejandro, Hana Clarice, Surasree Das, Lloyd Ekpe, Alie Karambash, Lesley Malin, Dawn Thomas Reidy, David Yezzi) of bad dreams and horrific visions – a house cleaned by blood, and later a snake sucking the life through her breast – all of which seem to send her into fits of depression. Upon seeing her husband once again, in a hilariously matter-of-fact fashion, she announces that she “may, just may, have tried to kill myself once or twice.” Too much of this sarcasm might have made her suffering farcical, but the subtlety of the material, paired with Anderson’s immaculate delivery, makes this would-be sociopath into a portrait of how easily twisted a soul may become by trauma and pain.
Less humorous, but much more impactful, is the staging of Iphigeneia’s murder early on in the production. Once again, the CSC excels in the ambiguity of the situation. In a flashback directly preceding the sacrifice, Agamemnon (Stephen Patrick Martin) debates with his wife the intentions of the Gods, as well as the importance of following their will. Far from the domineering, arrogant Agamemnon of The Iliad, Martin imbues the character with a tragic uncertainty, pacing beneath the sparse parapets of his castle and wringing his hands even as he assures his wife that dreams and visions are “how the Gods speak to us.” It may be hard for a modern audience to put themselves in Agamemnon’s shoes – I don’t imagine “vatic prophecy” holds up under a court’s scrutiny in the 21st century – but Martin and Co. do a wonderful job at establishing how important these divine prophecies would have been to the characters.
Our sympathies for Agamemnon make the eventual scene of sacrifice all the more painful. The blood pooling down the white dress of young Iphigeneia (Charlotte Molitoris), the cries of agony from Agamemnon, the darkness of the stage, it coheres to something evocatively horrifying. By the end of the scene, the audience can see in equal measure both the pain of Agamemnon and the reason for why Clytemnestra wishes him dead. In one clever detail, after Iphigeneia has been murdered, a great red curtain drops from the ceiling to the floor – Atropos, the mythological figure who severs the thread at the end of someone’s life, has severed yet another. Later, upon Agamemnon’s return, Clytemnestra lays out this same curtain upon which Agamemnon is meant to tread. The symbolism is strong – our past crimes become the path into our future punishments.
A weaker production might have clearly defined the “good” characters from the “bad” – a cruel Agamemnon, a snickering Clytemnestra, perhaps even a raging, homicidal Orestes – but moral ambiguity is at the very heart of The Oresteia. Thinking in terms of unambiguous “good/evil” is what gets many of the play’s characters into their binds in the first place: Agamemnon is “evil” for killing his daughter and deserves to die, Clytemnestra is “evil” for killing her husband and deserves to die, Orestes is “evil” for killing his mother and deserves to die, ad infinitum. Accepting the humanity of one another is sometimes the harder choice, but as the play itself illustrates, it is also much the better.
Even after the murder of both Agamemnon and his poor slave girl Cassandra (Emily Erickson), Orestes (Isaiah Harvey) struggles to kill his mother. Harvey’s performance, as equivocal and tortured as Martin’s Agamemnon, plays wonderfully off of the genuine betrayal seen from Anderson’s Clytemnestra. For just a moment, it seems as though better minds might prevail, and then comes an embrace, a blade deep in the queen’s stomach, and Clytemenstra is gone. The Furies appear, and the cycle of blood spins on, just the same as 2500 years ago.
Yet, more than anywhere else, it’s the third act of CSC’s Oresteia that truly marks a turning point. Whereas in the final section of the original, Apollo and Athena take over much of the dramatic action, The Gods and Furies of the CSC – shadowy forces and commanding voices off in the cellarages, bad dreams and bloody visions never seen on stage – recede from focus. Instead, the chorus, hitherto relegated to the background, takes center stage. No longer a mere family drama, the CSC allows its common-folk, the housekeepers and the milkmaids, to determine the fate of Orestes. This decision, a marked departure from the original, is actually hinted at by McLaughlin’s essay in the playbill.
“Let’s think of times in human history when, even after the worst has happened, people have done the right thing. I thought, if I can find a way to bring that essential grace to the third act of my play, I might be able to write my way to something like hope in these dark times… We don’t offer judgment at the end so much as the mystery of mercy, born of the act of listening and recognition.”
Altering the role of the Gods and the Furies is a bold choice, one that somehow both flouts the source material and keeps true to it. The Furies, who appear simply as seemingly possessed members of the Chorus, become less true physical force to harangue Orestes and more a reflection of his guilty, tortured psyche. Similarly, without the firm and guiding physical presence of the Gods, they become vague superstitions. Mankind is alone by the end of the play, left to find what McLaughlin calls our “mystery of mercy.” These are the ideas, more than anything else, that have kept The Oresteia so everlasting. For these reasons, whatever is altered or missing in the CSC’s production – personally this journalist missed Clytemenstra’s so-very-saucy infidelity subplot – it hits the mark just like the original.
Too often, the world can seem not unlike the one in The Oresteia, a tempestuous chaos of unclear choices, opposing sides, and bloodthirsty elites – especially in an election year. It is our choice, this production says, to allow the cycles of miscommunication, abuse, and revenge, to continue unopposed, or to reach out to one another for some common ground. This is the way, The Oresteia suggests, that we might wake up from the nightmares of the past – a good lesson for these times and for all time.
The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s production of The Oresteia runs from Feb. 16-March 10. Tickets $28-55.
