There may be no better example of the costs of the cycle of revenge than Aeschylus’ Oresteia. It’s the tale of how Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus killed her husband Agamemnon, king of Argos, just back from the sack of Troy, for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia — and how Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is driven to avenge his father’s death by killing his own mother, and then is besieged by Furies who demand Orestes’ death for the crime of matricide. This highly dramatic stuff is the thesis project of third-year director Yagil Eliraz at the Yale School of Drama. And it runs until December 18th at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street.
But wait a minute, you say. The Oresteia isn’t one play. It’s three: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides.
“That’s right,” Eliraz said with a small grin.
Yale School of Drama
Eliraz.
The first stage of his project was convincing the powers that be at YSD that he could make three plays into one play. Eliraz likes challenges, apparently. At YSD since 2013, he worked previously as a freelance director, drawn toward finding new approaches to classic theater. One of his more recent productions was Oedipus Rex at the Israel Festival in 2011. That was staged as opera-theater with 5 actors, 5 singers, and 10 instruments. Eliraz’s other proposal for his thesis was even more daunting than a condensed Oresteia: a merger of part 1 of Goethe’s Faust with the notoriously unstageable part 2. His lengthy breakdown of the play got tabled right away and he was asked for another idea. He suggested Ibsen’s expressionistic Peer Gynt, while pushing hard for the Oresteia. Finally, he got the go-ahead.
One challenge is that of style or genre. Eliraz knew he didn’t want a contemporary treatment or period version of Greek drama. His aim was a design concept that “is timeless and transcends time and place.” Further, what attracted Eliraz to Greek tragedy is the chance to combine music, text, and movement.
The role of the Chorus, usually enacted by three to five actors, is key to Greek drama. Eliraz has the entire cast of 11 “play” the Chorus, with all costume changes part of the action, and with all characters emerging from the group. That approach is very interesting because, as Eliraz says, Aeschylus gave the Chorus in the Oresteia “a function in the plot.” Its members go from being commentators on the action to persuaders of Orestes to both the Furies that would condemn him and the citizens of Athens who defend him in the trial that ends the play.
All well and good, but, Eliraz said, students at YSD generally aren’t versed in playing Greek tragedy. So that meant initial work, in the first ten days, on “getting everyone on the same page.” The crucial ingredient to this approach was letting music and movement dictate the acting style. To, as Eliraz said, “distill, for instance, the essence of grief with music, movement, and at most two lines of text.”
A big assist comes from having new music written for the production by Matthew Suttor, who worked as composer on recent Yale Repertory productions of Arcadia and The Winter’s Tale. For Eliraz’s Oresteia, Suttor has composed songs and a soundscape, and there will be a live percussionist onstage. Eliraz expresses nothing but admiration for how well his cast has lived up to his vision of the play.
And that vision includes, with the help of second-year dramaturg Divina Moss, a scaling down of the three plays so that the intermission comes at the center of the second play. In Act 1, we get the background of the curse on the house of Atreus, Agamemnon’s homecoming, and Clytemnestra’s vengeance. Five years later, Orestes meets his sister Elektra at Agamemnon’s grave and what Eliraz calls a “crescendo of ritual prayer” convinces him to avenge his father. Act 2 gives us Orestes’ revenge on his mother, which is also viewed as an end to the tyranny of the usurper Aegisthus, and then the trial to decide Orestes’ fate.
Since any play, no matter how ancient — and this one dates from the 5th century BC — becomes contemporary the minute it gets revived, I asked Eliraz what he considers the meaning of the play is for our moment. Rather than “statement” or “message,” he prefers thinking in term of “the play’s ultimate question: is there absolute justice?” That is, a justice for all?
Eliraz spoke of his own country, Israel, where a cycle of bloodshed has continued for generations, with each act of violence provoking retaliation. Old scores never get truly settled. For him, the only possible resolution to such carnage is forgiveness and mercy. That is what Aeschylus’ play, in its timeless way, helps us see.
So a timely moral might be extractable from the timeless Oresteia. Eliraz is quick to point out that the beginning of tragedy, in Greece, was a way of treating mythic material to arrive at a consensus for the polis. But, he says, one that “was rooted in religious ritual,” with each enactment of a play “beginning with slaughtering an animal as a sacrifice to Dionysus.” Slaughter. Sacrifice. Blood price. Death penalty. Forgiveness. Mercy. Rights to life. The struggle for clarity in these matters is powerfully ancient and viscerally contemporary. And that’s the point of theater.
The Oresteia by Aeschylus, translated by Ted Hughes and directed by Yagil Eliraz, runs at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel St., through Dec. 18. Click here for more information.