Word: leveaux
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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...
Perhaps Natasha Richardson, the gifted British actress who stars in David Leveaux's sturdy Broadway revival, figured that the play might not be terrible if Anna weren't quite so Swedish. She jettisons the immigrant inflections for a flat Minnesota accent. More helpfully, she makes Anna a fighter, battered on the wheel of men's lust but still defiantly erect. The actors' posture is important here. As Anna's negligent father, Rip Torn walks with the cramped stride of a man who stays upright by lying to himself -- even as Torn remains true to the text by speaking...