Lessons From Theater

I am told Richard Wagner was devoted to “Oresteia†and read all the parts aloud to friends, thus the notion that this sanguinary and wrathful trio of Greek tragedies by Aeschylus inspired Wagner’s “Ring†cycle, four operas which also lean on mythic tales (albeit Nordic mythic tales) to make heraldic drama for the stage.  

   Doing the telling here is Gregory Thompson, who is directing the three Aeschylus plays as part of Bard College’s annual SummerScape, this year paying homage to Wagner and to all things Wagnerian, even in reverse.

   Outside Frank Gehry’s steel-draped arts center on the Bard campus in Red Hook, NY, Thompson sits at a picnic table (a fire alarm tripped by an overheated coffee pot has evacuated the premises) and tells me what to expect of his modern-dress versions of three 1,500-year-old plays.

    “Everyday English,†Thompson says. Some translations of these classics are academic and faithful to the Greek. But this translation by the late U.K. Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (writer, teacher and husband to Sylvia Plath until the two separated a year before her suicide in 1963) is current, theatrical and unambiguous. No ox stands on the watchman’s tongue, keeping the fellow’s silence on Clytemnestra’s infidelity while her husband, the watchman’s master, King Agamemnon, wages war in Troy. Such colorful allusions are for reading, not for modern theater, the 44-year-old Englishman says.   

   The plots, of course, remain untouched. In “Agamemnon,†the first play in the trilogy, the king comes home to be dispatched within minutes by Clytemnestra. She wants revenge for Agamemnon’s sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia in exchange for smooth seas to prosecute his war against Troy. She is irked, too, that Agamemnon brought home his concubine, the prophet of doom Cassandra, who expects to be, and is, dispatched next. And Clytemnestra, like so many characters in the trilogy, has a yen for power, further motive for murdering her mate. And so it goes through “Choephori,†and, finally, “The Eumenides.â€

   Blood rains throughout  Greek Mythology with offspring cooked for the unknowing father’s dinner and revenge following atrocity as night the night (with all the bloodletting in the “Oresteia†offstage and out of sight, Thompson says).

   “Everybody’s got a point of view,†he tells me. For Agamemnon, sacrificing his daughter served the greater  good of waging war against tyrants, like President George Bush’s war on Saddam Hussein, he adds. Of course, Clytemnestra’s offspring, Orestes and Electra, seek revenge against their mother for killing their father, and so it goes to the third play. And atrocities spiral in Iraq.

   “In the end, the question is not who is right, but what kind of justice do we want? Instead of endless cycles of war, could we have reason and mercy?â€

  Such questions make “Oresteia†urgent, contemporary, personal, Thompson says.

   “And that is the job of theater, to give us a safe place to experience trauma, to manage what has already happened to us, or to rehearse what we know lies ahead, and where we meet with strangers to experience matters common to us all.†p

The “Oresteia†trilogy opens with

“Agamemnon, July 15; “Cheophori,†July 16; and “The Eumenides,†July 17, with single performances scheduled through Aug. 2 at Bard’s Fisher Center in Red Hook, NY.

On two Saturdays, July 18 and 25, all three plays will be presented in a single day with shows at 11 a.m.; 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.

For tickets and for information about all SummerScape events, call 845-758-7900 or go to www.fishercenter.bard.edu.