In the form of tradition and duty, the opinions of the gods hang on Electra like great weights while her mother and sister frolic in the pleasant light of gratuitous choice.
Courtney Walsh plays a powerfully regal and cunning Queen Clytemnestra with poise and intensity. She commands the stage, dutifully bowing to her doomed husband, pretending obedience, while showing her children deceit and murder. Courtney Walsh’s Clytemnestra fills many roles, seamlessly exchanging one for another while keeping her personal objectives first and foremost.
The play is held together by the intense, stoic will of Valentina .JPG)
Conde’s Electra, who refuses to compromise her love for her father or her hatred of his murderers. The avatar of hierarchy and obedience, she is the play in microcosm, the battleground between the stoics and the hedonists.
The chorus of women amplify the drama, appearing as landscape, architecture and townswomen, sometimes supporting Electra and upholding law and at other times pleading with her, trying to get her to give up the quest for vengeance and take the easy way out.. Eventually each steps forth. All cry out for Justice. Vengeance begets vengeance.
L. Peter Callender is a first rate storyteller who plays the mendacious Old Teacher, performing a captivating monologue about a chariot race and falsifying the death of his friend Orestes. Donell Hill plays a lascivious Aegisthus, Francesca McKenzie a spoiled-sister Chrysothemis and Patrick Davis a Pylades silent and obedient, all adding complexity to the texture of the play.
Sophocles' script doesn't give Orestes much to do, as he is already determined to avenge his father's murder. Sophocles beats around the bush quite a lot in the long speeches but that was the dramatic style in classical Athens and SST is faithful to it. The characters are always in motion, the performance dance-like. The chorus is on stage almost all the time. .JPG)
A scene from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon forms the prologue. Stanford scholar Rush Rehm directs the modern translation of the 5th century BC play, performing in the Memorial Auditorium on campus. Anne Carson’s translation is direct and colloquial, without becoming slangy or hip, a relief from stilted diction.
One of the biggest challenges in producing classical drama faithful to its period is projecting the hierarchical atmosphere of those times in a sympathetic light to a cast and audience whose idea of order is founded on individual choice and whose idea of chaos is obedience to absolute law. As Luke Taylor, the actor playing Orestes, said after the show, "Electra does not have the choice to sacrifice her integrity." SST's production solves the problem by giving the entire oppressive weight of hierarchy to Electra, who chooses to bear it alone in the face of incessant ridicule and reason from her mother, sister and from the townswomen in the chorus.
The play has everything: anguish, laughter, deception, murder, vengeance, motion, lasciviousness, original music, big sound, selfishness and altruism.
Everything about Stanford Summer Theater's Electra is big, including the characters, the spectacle, the sound and the irreconcilable issues. It is a pleasure seeing a resourceful and ambitious company mounting a great play. Don’t miss the opportunity to see ancient drama brought to life.
SST is also performing Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and Euripides’ Electra during the festival.
Sophocles’ Electra plays until August 15th, 2009.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/summertheater/
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