Word: clytemnestra
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...England Gothic face. After three years, partly spent touring abroad. Dancer Martha Graham had returned with her ballet company to perform in Manhattan, bringing with her a satchelful of Graham favorites and two new works: a sophisticated sexual romp called Embattled Garden and an evening-length ballet titled Clytemnestra, the most ambitious effort in years by the priestess of modern dance...
Garden, with lush, languid music by Carlos Surinach, was a kind of lovelorn-columnist's tour of Eden, with Adam, Eve, Adams's legendary wife Lilith and a hor mone-happy stranger as the disturbed protagonists. In style it was light but pricked with wryly ironic wit. Clytemnestra, with a grindingly dissonant score by Egyptian Composer Halim El-Dabh, was a more impressive work and far more complex. Both its power and its tortuous complexities derived from Choreographer Graham's technique of unfolding the story as a memory of past events sounding shrilly in the echo chamber...
...opinion drove Byron out of England, never to return. In Italy, he settled down as the lover of a draper's wife, Marianna Segati, wrote much verse (including most of his masterpiece, Don Juan) and many disgusted letters back to England about "the destruction with which my moral Clytemnestra hewed me down." But women he could not escape. They choked his mornings with billets-doux and crawled in his windows at night. He sighed and took what came...
Individual performances were good. Cassandra played by Elizabeth Richards, and Clytemnestra, by Polly Thayer were especially well drawn I thought. Neither laid too much stress on the poetry, as Aegisthus did, or on emotional for de force as Agamemnen tended to do. On the whole, everyone in the cast showed a good on and understanding of their parts...
Actress Paxinou-already known to Broadway for several performances in English-made an impressive though hardly an inspired Electra. Impressive, too, was the Orestes of Thanos Cotsopoulos, the Clytemnestra of A. Raftopoulou. But what is usually the stumbling block of modern productions of Greek drama-the management of the chorus-was this time the special glory. There were "a few too-mannered touches; but its grave movement, its now murmurous, now resonant chanting, its sudden, swift, intensely dramatic confrontation of the audience, gave it a kind of orchestral grandeur and swell...