Word: oresteia
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...bulk of the play is a retelling of the 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...
...Greeks, the Oresteia was an exemplary tale of moral downfall designed to evoke pity and terror. Rabe's tone is pejorative, like that of a prosecuting attorney who is pressing play goers to confess that all men are bloody-minded beasts. There is no court of appeal in The Orphan. God is dead, absolute power has produced absolute corruption and society is a cracked veneer of hypocrisy...
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...
...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...
...project. In nearby Waverly, Mrs. Hubert Humphrey showed her a bookmobile and artmobile and fed her homemade ice cream on the lawn. In Minneapolis-which hardly qualifies as a village-she suffered nobly through Tyrone Guthrie's The House of Atreus, a 31-hour version of Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy. In Columbus, Ind., "the Athens of the Prairie," she listened to the American National Opera Company and praised the striking smalltown, big-name architecture (including work by such distinguished designers as I. M. Pei and the late Eero Saarinen). At Ironwood, Mich., she dedicated a park. At Avoca...