Lunchtime with Aaron Posner

In eleven years of association with the Folger Theatre, Aaron Posner has become a docent favorite, thanks to productions such as Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and last year’s Macbeth, and thanks also to his engaging, frank and articulate discussions with us. He did not disappoint on January 19, when he took an hour off from rehearsals of Orestes: A Tragic Romp, an adaptation of Euripedes’ play by contemporary playwright Anne Washburn, which will run January 27 to March 7.

“It’s really exciting to direct a play by Euripedes with the author in the room,” he began, to general laughter, noting that Washburn has been an active participant in the rehearsal process. Orestes was a play she studied in college, and she always wanted to see it performed. As with most Greek drama, the existing translations are either academic and literal or highly poetic. Contemporary working playwrights, when adapting Greek drama, usually use the original story as a springboard to their own concerns. In this case, though, Washburn’s adaptation is quite close to the original. “Anne has brushed the dust off the play and updated the language,” said Aaron, “but the humor, the moral ambiguity, and the energy of the play are Euripedes’ own.”
A big challenge of Greek tragedy, for Aaron, is how to tell the story without “overwrought weeping and wailing.” He liked Washburn’s adaptation immediately, because her dry caustic tone puts the action at something of an ironic remove, without being too clever. “We talk a lot in rehearsal about the line between clever and good,” said Aaron. “Good to me means provoking a conversation about the play’s ideas and conflicts. ‘Who am I? How did I get here from there?’ are fascinating questions, whether you’re in therapy or watching Greek drama, and I want the ideas out front.”

Aaron is setting the action in an imagined, created world that represents no particular time period, though the audience may detect Greek overtones in the costumes and set. (The floor of the stage is covered in stones, an idea Aaron had one day while sitting on the gravel of the Folger’s Elizabethan Garden.) The music, written for the show by frequent collaborator James Sugg, is influenced by everything from pop to gospel to classical, but does not refer directly to any genre. It will be sung by a five-member, female “chorus.” The production will also feature ironic, cross-dressing doubling in the cast—for example, Holly Twyford plays both Electra and Electra’s grandfather. In a nod to the Greek practice of using masks, most of the minor doubled characters wear glasses.

“This is as hard as anything I’ve ever done,” Aaron confessed. “How to integrate the over-the-top tragedy, the music and movement and rhythm in ways that aren’t just ridiculous to a modern audience is a constant challenge. It feels like we’re on a perilous, narrow mountain path we can fall off at any time.”