Word: clytemnestra
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sophocles' Electra is no Hamlet. She doesn't agonize over whether to avenge the murder of her father Agamemnon by killing her mother Clytemnestra. She just does it (or rather, has her brother Orestes do it). Leveaux, who has brought his crisp staging of the tragedy from London to Broadway, says he was thinking of events in Bosnia: Can the cycle of vengeance ever end? Yet he resists the urge to add modern complexities to this fiercely singleminded play. Enough to watch the talented Zoe Wanamaker as a very human, almost waifish Electra, buried in a gigantic overcoat, like...
...performed in New York. The masterpieces began to flow, as they would over several decades. There was a cluster of distinctively American works, such as Letter to the World, about Emily Dickinson, and the ever vernal Appalachian Spring. Though a quintessential modernist, she was attracted to doomed classical heroines: Clytemnestra, Medea, Alcestis, Phaedra...
Still, Kelly Matthews should be commended for her dead-pan Athena, Branion for his studied assimilation of the roles of both Orestes and Apollo, and Robyn Fass for her humorous Clytemnestra. If nothing else one can be grateful to Tan, his crew and the cast for bringing Mayer's work to the public...