Word: clytemnestras
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...Oresteia legend, and it makes for some restive or torpid listening depending on the playgoer's mood. The basic story line is intact. With his fleet becalmed on the way to Troy, Agamemnon (W.B. Brydon) sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to win the gods' favor. His embittered wife Clytemnestra takes a lover, Aegisthus, who murders Agamemnon upon his return from the war. The dead king's son, Orestes, goaded to revenge by his sister Electra, proceeds to murder his mother and Aegisthus. Rabe has drastically minimized Electra's role, but he provides two Clytemnestras, possibly to differentiate...
...Jeff Bleckner's stolidly reverential direction, there is little room for such diversionary tactics as entertainment or such revisionist behavior as love and the spontaneous response of one human being to another. Only one actor seems to escape the arid dogmatism of the evening-Marcia Jean Kurtz as Clytemnestra the mother. When she pleads for her daughter's life, she reveals a tenacity and a tenderness that banish all curses and shame all crimes...
...particular hell is this: while Ezra Mannon (Agamemnon) is away at war, his wife Christine (Clytemnestra) takes a lover, Adam Brant (Aegisthus). Daughter Lavinia (Electra) adores her father, hates her mother and is smitten with Adam. Ezra's return results in homicide and suicide. When the killing ends, Lavinia locks herself in the ancestral mansion to placate the ghosts of her forebears in solitary, lifelong penance...
Fashion Conscious. There are, however, some errors of judgment and direction and the sound is often less than stereo fidelity. When Regina Resnik's Clytemnestra (in the Hamburg Elektra) is in full cry, the camera suddenly becomes fashion conscious: it stoops and meticulously inspects her hemline (floor length). In an otherwise masterful Così fan Tutte, the camera focuses mostly on a collection of ambulatory bird cages, making nonsense of Ferrando's aria, Un' aura amoroso...
...NATHAN was striking as Clytemnestra, a part which suited her gaunt figure and certainly her shrill, frenzied voice. Al Ranzio's nasal monotone was bothersome at times, but as Zeus, he combined all the self-assurance and comic undertones which Sartre wrote into the role. Norma Levin had surely the most difficult assignment as Electra. She captured the guilelessness of Sartre's very ordinary, very energetic heroine; she also got to speak some of Sartre's most beautiful set-pieces, the little speeches of reminiscence which form a motif in the play...