Word: aeschylus
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While a Harvard undergraduate, Timothy Mayer '66 overhauled Aeschylus' Eumenides, the last part of the Greek playwright's Oresteia trilogy. The result is a sophisticated, irreverent interpretation called Red Eye. Last weekend at the Agassiz Theater, Orestes' flight from the furies and trial in the Athenian court underwent futher revision in director Patrick Tan's ambitions adaptation of Mayer's play...
...designed an intergalactic Gothic set in which to develop his complex vision. Placed in a world of darkness and asymmetries, Aeschylus' familiar characters are de-familiarized, distored and dissected. Athena, once the cool, collected goddess of wisdom, is transformed into a weary, indifferent hostess. The Athenian court of justice degenerates into a cocktail party where under-the-table arm-twisting subverts the Athenian ideal of justice. The furies are not beyond consoling themselves with booze, narcotics and yogurt, not is Orestes above Oedipal fantasies for the mother whome he has murdered...
Throughout the play, Tan resists placing his characters in simple, archetypical roles, cultivating instead the psychological complexities and hidden motivations that inform the resolution of Aeschylus' own version. Who would have suspected that Apollo would have to use an erotic tango dance to persuade Athena to side with him on Orestes' behalf...
...Kenneth Clark. She usually remained mute about her generosities with money and time, but the helpful annotating of Biographer Lewis and his wife Nancy fills in many gaps. She read extensively and exhaustively in a number of languages; in one letter she casually mentions enjoying a new translation of Aeschylus into German. She was often quite funny, even naughty; she writes of seeing a ballerina, noted for dancing barefoot and suggestively unclothed, "even to the most intimate interstices of her person...
...Greeks held so firmly to their past that we forget how far back they had to reach for it. It is easy to lose sight of the long centuries -- there were eight of them -- that separate the heroes of the Trojan War from the age of Socrates and Aeschylus, which paid homage to them. Much of what lay between was not an unbroken line of glory but a dim interregnum. The Mycenaean Greece that leveled Troy around 1200 B.C. was itself in ruins a hundred years later, smashed by Dorian invaders from the north. There followed a dark age that...