Word: atreus
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Meticulous Revival. Tame stuff, until the audience realizes that this is a fantasy of wish fulfillment. The Millers are the family O'Neill would have preferred to those refugees from the House of Atreus with whom he was actually saddled. Throughout the play there are wood-notes of despair that provide a counterpoint, hinting that the Millers have within them the same talent for self-destruction as the Tyrones of O'Neill's autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night. With bad luck, comforting Mother Essie might become junkie Mary Tyrone; responsible Father Nat could turn...
...with a lubriciously contented purr. Together with the repeated cue name of My Lai and references to the slaughter of innocents, of whom Iphigenia is the first, Rabe's intent is clear to the point of didactic overkill-to make the curse and crimes of the House of Atreus appear to be the inevitable pattern of all human behavior...
Mourning Becomes Electra is like a day of wild wind and rain that finally reduces everyone and everything to a sodden, nerveless pulp. O'Neill transposed the Oresteia-the legend of the doomed Greek house of Atreus-to post-Civil War New England and laced it with Freudianism. O'Neill never achieves the catharsis of pity and terror, only the strangulated sob of a guilty Christian conscience: "I believed in heaven. Now I know there is only hell...
...play (perhaps his greatest) draws on the lore of Greek mythology to dramatize philosophical dilemmas of "choice" central to his own thought. Unlike Girandoux and Cocteau, so often careless and fanciful in their dramatic use of Greek "gods" and fate, Sartre adopts the symbolic fable of the House of Atreus as a serious medium for analysis of social guilt. He throws the uprooted Orestes into a miasma of remorse and penitent masochism. But in portraying Orestes' collaboration with Electra to avenge the murder of their father, Sartre avoids abstraction and presents his characters concretely...
...House of Atreus is an adaptation by John Lewin of Aeschylus' trilogy, The Oresteia. Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to win from the gods a favoring wind that will speed his fleet to Troy. Mad with grief and fury, his Queen, Clytemnestra, awaits the return of the victorious King from the Trojan War, and while he is in his bath she stabs him to death. Aided by his sister Electra, Agamemnon's son Orestes in turn murders both his mother and her lover Aegisthus. Pursued by the Furies, Orestes is tried before the goddess of Athens...